As most of you are aware of there is a classification process that is used on the internet to organize information. Basically this classification process is used to help users find information that they are looking for as fast as possible. When it comes to this classification process there are numerous things that go into making up the entire process. The first thing that you need to know about is tags, which are basically the words that are used to describe the information you are posting on the internet. The next two things that you need to know about are folksonomy and top-down taxonomy, the reason why you need to know about both of these is that the two kind of work together to help you find information on the internet. Basically both top-down taxonomy and folksonomy are methods that are used to help categorize the information you find on the internet.

Let’s begin by first talking about taxonomy in general. Most of you have probably heard of the word taxonomy at some point in your life because it is a word that is used in numerous science classes. The reason for this is that taxonomy is a science, but unlike the study of living objects or chemicals taxonomy is the science of identifying and naming objects. Basically what happens with taxonomy is that the objects are identified and named and then are placed in different categories depending on their classification. So basically what this means is that taxonomy is used to place things into a certain order, basically to organize things.

Now that we understand about taxonomy we need to take a look at top-down taxonomy. Basically top-down taxonomy is an approach to taxonomy. With this approach you basically have one set of tags and one sort order that is used to help identify the information that you are looking for. One of the best examples of the top-down taxonomy approach is Yahoo!, which was one of the earliest general directories for content on the internet. Basically top-down taxonomy is a controlled vocabulary, which actually means that there are limitations on the tags that are used to describe the content that is being posted.

Now we need to take a look at folksonomy to be sure that we understand that method. Folksonomy is the method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. Basically folksonomy is using words that will help computer search engines to recognize your website and display it on a search engine results page in the proper category. Basically this is done through the use of tags or what other people refer to as key words. In fact folksonomy is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social tagging and numerous other names.

So as you can tell both folksonomy and top-down taxonomy have their uses on the internet. But the thing is that depending on who you talk to and what information you find on the internet you are going to get different opinions. Many people believe that folksonomy is actually better because it is not as restrictive. But regardless of what people think of as the better system and no matter how many differences they quote the truth of the matter is that there are some differences, but there are more similarities between the two systems than there are differences. In fact many people tend to think that the best possible solution would be to make some new kind of method that combined these two methods together. One of these would be taxonomy-directed-folksonomy which would rely on the user interface to suggest tags from a formal taxonomy, but allows many users to use their own tags.