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Knowledge Management Tools 279

hand side of individual tag pages, under related tags of most social bookmarking sites.
Tag clouds represent emergent or organically grown taxonomies — commonly referred
to as folksonomies, a term coined by Thomas van der Wal in 2004 ( Smith 2004 , in
Mathes 2004) as a combination of folk and taxonomy.
Folksonomies differ from traditional taxonomies in that there is no hierarchy, no
object-oriented style of inheritance from parent object to child object, just clusters of
tags that appear to be loosely related. They also do not follow taxonomy rules in that
folksonomies can have more than one type of relationship between the same terms.
In a typical folksonomy, terms will differ in their level of specifi city, they may be
qualitatively different, and they may not necessarily make sense! A folksonomy, in
other words, freely advocates mixing apples and oranges. The drawbacks are once
again lack of standardization, ambiguity, diminished rigor in classifying, and the use
of a fl at rather than hierarchical space. The advantages are being able to use the every-
day language that users have and unlimited expansion of keywords. Finding through
serendipity improves retrieval by being able to observe what others felt were related
knowledge.
As with social bookmarking, folksonomies appear particularly well suited to com-
munities of practice, where peer-to-peer sharing can be augmented through the folk-
sonomy approach. A folksonomy should help increase cooperation and knowledge
sharing among community members by making visible what often remains an invis-
ible model of who knows whom and who knows what or who is interested in what
topic. Folksonomies can therefore be considered as knowledge creation tools (creation
of tags) and knowledge sharing and dissemination tools (peer-to-peer sharing, public
posting of tags) as well as a knowledge application tool (metadata that contextualizes
when and where the knowledge should be used).
A fi nal note: folksonomies and more traditional knowledge organization schemes
(see chapter 4) need not be mutually exclusive. A folksonomy can be an excellent
starting point for a more formal taxonomy. The folksonomy can serve a needs-analysis
function and permit the users to make use of their own preferred vocabulary while
the designers link this to the more formal taxonomy through a thesaurus. This linkage
will also serve as a form of personalization of the search and retrieval interface for the
users.

Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)
Personal capital is a term coined by Cope (2000) as a divergence from the traditional
notion of capital, which is an asset owned by an organization. In fact, the future of