Abstract:
There are numerous methods used to organize the contemporary printed literature as well as web-based
information. These methods can be categorized as traditional and less-traditional methods. There are
many instances in which traditional methods have been adopted to organize web resources, nevertheless
it is believed that they were not exploited to the maximum for organizing the web. The second approach
to organize information on web is the non-traditional approach of developing new initiatives and
innovation which include semantic networks and ontologies and the common term used for all these
methods is “Knowledge Organisation Systems”. This second approach is more familiar to the information
scientists and computer specialist but unfamiliar to librarians. However even the KOSs were not the
ultimate solution for web-organising. They are imprecise because they cannot be easily adopted for the
rapid pace of content development brought-about by Web publishing. This sluggishness of the KOSs
paved way for another alternative classification - the users to create metadata for the web-based
information resources. It is a distributed classification scheme created by a group of individuals, typically
the resource users and known as folksonomy. This paper traces the development of folksonomy, its
advantages and disadvantages and attempts to answer the question whether traditional classification
systems will be replaced by folksonomy.
