Stock WG "Folksonomies and Science Communication" Information Services & Use 27:97-103, 2007.

[Eugene Garfield]

E-mail: stock at phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de

AUTOR : Stock, Wolfgang G.

TITLE : Folksonomies and Science Communication

SOURCE: Information Services & Use 27:97-103, 2007.

ABSTRACT: 
Folksonomies complete the methods of indexing scientific documents.  Now 
scientists in their function as readers may play an active role in science 
communication as well, since they can tag documents with terms taken from 
their professional or personal environment.  Folksonomies allow the 
indexing of documents by everyone without following any rules.  Besides the 
benefits of some folksonomies, there are severe problems, e.g. the tags' 
lack of precision.  In order to overcome the shortcomings of this 
collaborative indexing method, we introduce natural language processing of 
tags and a relevance ranking algorithm which is based on specific tag 
distributions, on aspects of collaboration and on the actions of 
the "prosumers".  This article is a plea for the combination of the "old" 
science databases and the benefits of the folksonomies.