Uniting formal and informal descriptive power: Reconciling ontologies with folksonomies

Ontologies and folksonomies are currently the most prominent web content classification schemes. While their roles are similar, their engineering is different. In an attempt to combine and harness their distinct powers, web and information scientists are attempting to integrate them, merging the flexibility, collaboration and information aggregation of folksonomies with the standardisation, automated validation and interoperability of ontologies. This paper explores the basics of web information classification engineering, identifies the strengths and weaknesses of the existing methodologies, assesses their effectiveness and investigates a number of key quality issues. It then investigates the existing methods for integrating ontologies and folksonomies and examines the integration requirements. It finally proposes a common framework for reconciliation of the two classification approaches and quality assurance.