The six blind men of Hindostan - The original folksonomists

A couple of days ago there was a blog post, which expressed dissatisfaction with the tag of "Nuremberg" associated with photographs on flickr, which I had commented on. For some other reason, I was also thinking of elephants. And then the two came together to trigger this post.

Everyone I presume knows the story of the six blind men of Hindostan, and how they tried to describe an elephant. Everyone in the story 'tagged' the elephant according to their own partial knowledge. The tags they used included, tree, rope, pillar, wall, and so on. I am not sure what the tags were, but you get the point.

On a facetious note, it occurred to me, that these six blind men, could not have foreseen (pun intended), that their invention would be revolutionary at some future point of time. Frustrated as they must have been with the effort of mentally trying to assemble these 'tags' into a coherent whole that made sense, I doubt if they gave much thought to their contribution to posterity.

On a more serious note, imagine someone who saw those tags in a tag-cloud, (what kind of tag-clouds would they have had those days!) all associated with this nameless object, which was clearly known to be an animal. Do you think, they would have been able to put those tags together and conjured the synthesized image of an elephant? Imagine scouring through that cloud, thinking that buried somewhere under that 'wordle' mess, was an elephant.

I have my own thoughts on the purpose and utility of folksonomies. Like in most other cases, I believe in understanding the boundaries of their utility, rather than give in to an 'irrational exuberance'.

Working on a large project with an Education agency some time ago, I was part of a vigorous debate on the merits of taxonomies vs.. folksonomies. The client interestingly wanted fairly sophisticated versions of both. Rather coincidentally, I later found another educational institution in Australia, which too had used similar mixed concepts. I was convinced then, that the client's arguments had merit.

In fact, I am now of the opinion, that particularly in organizational contexts, where structure is an essential aspect of its way of being, information architectures must provide for a mix of taxonomies and folksonomies. The folksonomies can put the flesh on the skeletal structure of the taxonomy, but the two must coexist, or the elephant will never come together. Maybe in that spirit, we need a new name for the combination of taxonomies and folksonomies - 'jumbonomies'.

Wonder what your experience has been in reconstructing elephants, or sheep for that matter.