New High-Tech Systems for Web-Based Information Retrieval in the Twenty-First Century
The way people retrieve information has been altered by the advent of high-tech information systems. These systems allow people to search for information in ways never imagined even two years ago. With wiki-based projects people themselves can contribute articles and information for millions of others to read and use. Google’s mission to “organize the world’s information” has spawned its own version of a map service to work location into the Web system. These methods are just the groundwork for new tools that will shape our future as never before.
Recently a new form of information organization has appeared. It is known as a folksonomy, a term coined by Thomas Vander Wal that is a combination of folk and taxonomy (Mathes, 2004). The reason for inclusion of the word folk is because a folksonomy is a taxonomy organized by people, usually including digital media found on the Web. Principle to the ability for a folksonomy to function is metadata: data about data. Metadata, in a general context, is information about books, documents, articles, and photographs that is usually used for organization and easy accessibility (Mathes, 2004). It helps systems and human searchers collocate and find related data, respectively. There are three ways by which metadata is created. Traditionally, metadata has been made through the work of professionals, such as library catalogers, using set rules for classification of material, such as the Dewey Decimal System. Mathes points out that because professional creation is time consuming and costly, it is unfit for use on the Web. Moreover, there is simply too much information to cover. Another form is author creation, in which the author of material provides metadata about the material. However, the users are disconnected from the process; indeed, they may not have the ability to fully comprehend the contents of the metadata. A third form is...