UDC and folksonomies

Abstract

Social tagging systems, known as ‘folksonomies’, represent an important part of web resource discovery as they enable free and unrestricted browsing through information space. Folksonomies consisting of subject designators (tags) assigned by users, however, have one important drawback: they do not express semantic relationships either hierarchical or associative between tags. As a consequence, the use of tags to browse information resources requires moving from one resource to another, based on coincidence and not on the pre-established meaningful or logical connections that may exist between related resources. We suggest that the semantic structure of the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) may be used in complementing and supporting tag-based browsing. In this work, two specific questions were investigated: (1) Are terms used as tags in folksonomies included in the UDC? and (2) Which facets of UDC match the characteristics of documents or information objects that are tagged in folksonomies? A collection of the most popular tags from Amazon, LibraryThing, Delicious and 43Things was investigated. The universal nature of UDC was examined through the universality of topics and facets covering diverse human interests which are at the same time interconnected and form a rich and intricate semantic structure. The results suggest that UDC-supported folksonomies could be implemented in resource discovery, in particular in library portals and catalogues.