Abstract
Folksonomy is characterized as a democratic and interactive feature as far as the representation of documents online is concerned. In what regards the treatment of photographs, the use of folksonomy becomes a current issue due to the accuracy and specificities in access points, the representation by means of natural language and the promotion of collective intelligence. Yet, the conceptual polysemy and the lack of control of vocabulary both imply disadvantages concerning the effectiveness of the information retrieval systems in use by folksonomy; thus substantiating the prominence of controlled vocabulary in the representation of information. In this context, the purpose of this study is to indicate and to bring forward the adjustment of the advantages of folksonomy and taxonomy in the representation of the content of photographs. The methodology employed has mainly to do with literature review in the areas of Information Science, Art, History and Technology for the elaboration of the theoretical basis for the present study. Furthermore, this contributed to the identification of case studies. The investigation provided satisfactory results regarding the convergence of folksonomy and taxonomy, i.e., in the adequacy of users’ contributes (by means of tags, descriptions and/or comments) to the controlled vocabularies adopted in the representation and retrieval of information by means of photograph documents, textual ones and documents of any other gender.
Keywords:
Representation of Information; Photographs; Taxonomy; Folksonomy