Question of the week response 2/06

An example of folksonomy used on the web is the website www.deviantart.com. It is a community of artists who create virtual galleries to display their art. The shear number of works on the site (currently 18,670,812) calls for some way to organize and search within this data. This is where folksonomy is used. The artist assigns tags to their work like whether the piece is a photograph, painting, digital, etc. and then it's subject, finally a name. To top it off, each artist has their own avatar that appears next to the posts they make on the forums or comments under the art pieces. Now the viewer on the website can search by all of this as well as date submitted or most popular. This way a massive chunk of data can be segmented multiple times making exploration of the site a joy.