A social solution to the problem of information hierarchies

SIMO S. HÄMÄLÄINEN, student, University of Lapland, Finland

HELEN HEINMAA, student, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia

Many organisations deal with a large amounts of information. Much of the information is internal and stored in a shared filesystem on the intranet. Examples include policy documents, organisational information, contracts and internal documentation.

In traditional file storage, content creators and users organise information using filesystem hierarchies. Few aids exist in locating information quickly and reliably. Sometimes documents logically belong to several places in the hierarchy. As new directories are created, related documents may end up in different branches (do administrational documents on a techical project belong to the project or admin hierarchy?) Various versions of the same file may live in different locations, and keeping them synchronised is challenging. Creating documents involves traversing directories, creating documents, naming them, saving and then documenting their existence.

One proposed solution to this problem is semantic metadata, ie. documenting relationships between documents. Unfortunately this has proved not to work well. Organisations' internal information is often informal and spontaneous, and adding semantics is too difficult and time-consuming.

Replacing semantics with folksonomies provides a flexible alternative. Instead of accessing documents using directory hierarchies, all documents are accessed from various angles using tags. Content creators and users can freely tag documents with suitable keywords, and a search locates documents using these keywords.

Folksonomies are faster to use than hierarchies. Although informal, they have proved a powerful tool in organising large amounts of information. Users are becoming familiar with tags: from Twitter to Flickr, they're used to classify massive amounts of data.

Content creation must be trivially easy. Creating a document means clicking a "new document" button. This opens a WYSIWYG editor. There is no 'save' button: changes are automatically saved and become  immediately available to the network. The system handles document revision control, so full change history of the documents is available.