A methodology for folksonomy evaluation

Abstract

In recent years, the folksonomies were created and maintained in libraries and other information organizations alongside the traditional subject indexing systems. Folksonomies, consisting of tags, often express the "wisdom of the crowd". Despite their weaknesses and unstructured form, they reveal the language of users or even the terminology of the experts. This knowledge could be exploited in order to update and enrich the indexing vocabularies, thus improving information services. This paper deals with the design of an evaluation model for social tags. It introduces four quality indicators for an information service which offers social tagging functionalities, a weighted metric for the tag assessment process and a set of evaluation criteria that support information professionals to select meaningful tags as new descriptors to a set of bibliographic records.