a collection of meta-data which has been developed by users in a collaborative, "top-down" fashion

a type of classification system that spontaneously arises out of the way users tag items of information with freely chosen keywords (a more common term, in fact, is tagging )

a type of distributed classification system

a user-generated classification, emerging through bottom-up consensus, a la Flickr , Furl , and Del

a way of developing a bottom-up taxonomy from the tags being generated at such a site

Folksonomy refers to a community-generated labeling system where individual users create their own tags to apply to content such as online photos, blog entries, and Web links. This word was popularized by Thomas Vander Wal who coined the term, literally meaning “peoples' classification management” to describe an emerging phenomenon.

A folksonomy is an Internet-based information retrieval methodology consisting of collaboratively generated, open-ended labels that categorize content such as Web pages, online photographs, and Web links. A folksonomy is most notably contrasted from a taxonomy in that the authors of the labeling system are often the main users (and sometimes originators) of the content to which the labels are applied. The labels are commonly known as tags and the labeling process is called tagging.