Shortfalls of Social Tagging

Many organizations waste time and money researching answers to questions already answered or creating content that may already have been done by others within the organization. What shortfalls of social tagging does Trant identify that might prohibit a searchable tagging system to be a successful aid within an organization such as a business or school?

According to Trant, “There is concern over the relativistic nature of socially created vocabularies, the lack of term consistency, problems with synonymy and polysemy, and the inherent inconsistency of a user-generated vocabulary. All of these characteristics may limit the value of a folksonomy as an indexing language and retrieval tool.”

I think that Trant means that when dealing with folksonomy, it is questionable whether the words that people create are actually a good representation of the resource and relative to the information. Since tags are compiled by the public, the terms used might not be consistent because of the variety of people creating these tags. Synonymy is the similarities between words and polysemy is the uncertainty of a words meaning. These can be a problem because when words sound similar or when people are uncertain of a meaning, they might use the wrong word as a tag. These shortfalls would prohibit a searchable tagging system from being a successful aid within an organization because people would have a greater chance of retrieving the wrong information because of the erroneous tags that are produced by the public.