Thomas Vander Wal

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Thomas Vander Wal.

Thomas Vander Wal is an information architect best known for coining the term "folksonomy". [1] He is also known for initiating the term "infocloud". [2] His work has primarily dealt with the Web and with information design and structure especially in the context of social technology.

Contents

Personal

Vander Wal attended high school at Lincoln High School in Stockton (California, USA), then went on to get his BA in communication at Saint Mary's College of California in Moraga. He has also attended the Center for Medieval Renaissance Studies at Oxford and holds a MPP from Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute. [3]

He currently lives in Bethesda, Maryland. [4]

Concepts

Folksonomy

Vander Wal is credited with coining the term “folksonomy’ in 2004. [5] Folksonomy is sometimes called collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, or social tagging. It refers to taxonomies created by users applying their own tags to pieces of information (including articles, pictures, and websites). The tags aid users in categorizing information for both personal management and sharing with others. These user generated taxonomies stand in contrast to professionally created ontologies and taxonomies used for resource discovery and retrieval in more traditional knowledge organization systems.

Personal InfoCloud

The Personal InfoCloud is the information that a user collects, organizes, and carries with them, a bit like your personal slice of the web. Instead of focusing on very large and relatively public social spaces on the internet, the Personal InfoCloud represents a desire to use the internet to connect to a small group of people on a more personal level, and keep specific information accessible to that group. The point here is that the information needs to be accessible to the user in a very short amount of time. Thus, aggregation, personal organization and portability all flow from the need for accessibility. Vander Wal links the Personal InfoCloud to concepts like personal archiving, information overload, and what he calls the “Come to Me Web”. [6]

Model of Attraction

Much of his work, including the Personal InfoCloud and folksonomies, is undergirded by what he calls the Model of Attraction. MoA is a metaphor, much like navigation or sense of smell, that helps information architects and web developers think about the way that users interact with information. To think about MoA in relation to folksonomies, certain terms are associated with different pieces of information. The strength of the association can be visualized as a magnetic field, bringing certain kinds of information around a term. When a user searches on that term, they enter into the magnetic field. To think about MoA in relation to the Personal InfoCloud, a user’s associated information and interests create a similar magnetic field, which draws pertinent information to them, and keeps it around them. [7]

Professional experience

Vander Wal works at InfoCloud Solutions as the Principal and Senior Consultant. [8] InfoClouds Solutions is Vander Wal’s consulting company that advises on the range of digital content/media, folksonomy/tagging, social web, and personal to social information use and reuse.

He is a columnist at KM World, [9] writes on his own blog “Off the Top” and he has worked for the INDUS Corporation in Bethesda, Maryland, is a member of the Founding Leadership Council for The Information Architecture Institute, and the Steering Committee for the Web Standards Project (WaSP). He is also the Alumni Tech Lead for Boxes and Arrows magazine.

He spoke at the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Web convention in January 2008. [10]

Related Research Articles

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tag cloud</span> Visual representation of word frequency

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Subject indexing is the act of describing or classifying a document by index terms, keywords, or other symbols in order to indicate what different documents are about, to summarize their contents or to increase findability. In other words, it is about identifying and describing the subject of documents. Indexes are constructed, separately, on three distinct levels: terms in a document such as a book; objects in a collection such as a library; and documents within a field of knowledge.

The steve.museum project was a collaborative effort to improve public access to and engagement with US art museum collections. It explored the possibilities of user-generated descriptions of works of art, also known as folksonomy. Project staff in 2011 comprised a group of volunteers, mostly from art museums, including the Guggenheim Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as well as Archives & Museum Informatics.

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Folksonomy is a classification system in which end users apply public tags to online items, typically to make those items easier for themselves or others to find later. Over time, this can give rise to a classification system based on those tags and how often they are applied or searched for, in contrast to a taxonomic classification designed by the owners of the content and specified when it is published. This practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging. Folksonomy was originally "the result of personal free tagging of information [...] for one's own retrieval", but online sharing and interaction expanded it into collaborative forms. Social tagging is the application of tags in an open online environment where the tags of other users are available to others. Collaborative tagging is tagging performed by a group of users. This type of folksonomy is commonly used in cooperative and collaborative projects such as research, content repositories, and social bookmarking.

Collaborative tagging, also known as social tagging or folksonomy, allows users to apply public tags to online items, typically to make those items easier for themselves or others to find later. It has been argued that these tagging systems can provide navigational cues or "way-finders" for other users to explore information. The notion is that given that social tags are labels users create to represent topics extracted from online documents, the interpretation of these tags should allow other users to predict the contents of different documents efficiently. Social tags are arguably more important in exploratory search, in which the users may engage in iterative cycles of goal refinement and exploration of new information, and interpretation of information contents by others will provide useful cues for people to discover topics that are relevant.

Elium, previously referred to as Knowledge Plaza, is a Software as a Service used for enterprise knowledge sharing within organisations. It supports use cases for knowledge management, social bookmarking, document management, wikis and internal social network. It was initially designed as an information management tool for knowledge workers and is often used for collaborative research projects, market intelligence, information brokerage, etc.

Social navigation is a form of social computing introduced by Paul Dourish and Matthew Chalmers in 1994, who defined it as when "movement from one item to another is provoked as an artifact of the activity of another or a group of others". According to later research in 2002, "social navigation exploits the knowledge and experience of peer users of information resources" to guide users in the information space, and that it is becoming more difficult to navigate and search efficiently with all the digital information available from the World Wide Web and other sources. Studying others' navigational trails and understanding their behavior can help improve one's own search strategy by guiding them to make more informed decisions based on the actions of others.

References

  1. Peters, Isabella. Folksonomies: Indexing and Retrieval in Web 2.0. Berlin, Germany: Gruyter, 2009. 154.
  2. Van del Wal, Thomas. "Understanding the Personal Info Cloud." Presentation at the University of Maryland. June 8, 2004.
  3. "Meet the team". FatDUX. Archived from the original on 29 February 2012. Retrieved 29 February 2012.
  4. Bogaards, Peter. "Thomas Vander Wal: the Infodesigns profile" . Retrieved 29 February 2012.
  5. Furner, Jonathan. Folksonomies. pp. 1858–1866. doi:10.1081/e-elis3-120043238.
  6. Vander Wal, Thomas. "Understanding the Personal InfoCloud" (PDF). Retrieved 29 February 2012.
  7. Vander Wal, Thomas. "Model of Attraction" . Retrieved 29 February 2012.
  8. "About InfoClouds Solutions".
  9. "Authors: Thomas Vander Wal". KM World.
  10. Web Publishing 2008: Speaker's Bios