Peter Merholz has a good article talking about the approach of letting
the more street-level taxonomies emerge and then harvesting into
something that's a little more cleaned up. It seems quite promising to
me, though I imagine tool support will have to be pretty advanced for
this process to have some elegance to it.

http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000361.php

Incidentally, the photo on that page is of a lawn where landscape
designers let people first walk across the grass, then paved the most
common paths. It's a nice metaphor.

Francis Hwang
Director of Technology
Rhizome.org
phone: 212-219-1288x202
AIM: francisrhizome
+ + +
On Feb 23, 2005, at 5:04 AM, Ivan Pope wrote:

> I think there is value in looking at the space between 'scientific'
> taxonomies and 'folk' taxonomies. Folk taxomomies are created for use
> on
> the ground, e.g. local names for plants and animals. Scientific
> taxonomies are created by the scientists and academics who come along
> after the event.
> In the  'media network computer art' space, a folk taxonomy is
> constantly created, updated and made obsolete within the networks. This
> is a live and user based taxonomy, responsive to everyday needs but not
> structured for completeness.
> Then writers and academics will come along to create an scientific
> taxonomy - which they can only do by studying the granular nature of
> the
> works. This new taxonomy may or may not make use of existing
> terminology, but if it does use it, it runs into severe problems with
> existing users who become aware of the new taxonomy.
> However, it may in the tensions between the folk and the scientific
> taxonomy that we find fertile ground for study.
>
> Cheers,
> Ivan (who made the entry for Folk Taxonomy in Wikipedia)
>
> Francis Hwang wrote:
>
>> On Feb 21, 2005, at 3:17 PM, Murphy wrote:
>>
>>> In honor of the recent suicide of Hunter S. Thompson* I'd like to
>>> coin
>>> the term "gonzo taxonomy". It's closely related to the current trend
>>> for "tagging" as a way of indexing art works on sites like Flickr.
>>> The
>>> art administrator side of me hates this trend, the artist side of me
>>> loves it. Messy, sure, but it may be one possible path to follow.
>>
>>
>> Not bad, but first you'll have to tell people not to use "folksonomy"
>> -- that neologism seems to have a lot of traction these days.
>>
>> f.
>