Thomas Vander Wal
Principal, and Senior Consultant at InfoCloud Solutions
4-5:30 pm
UM: 411 West Hall
WSU: 313 State Hall (via videoconference)
Coming to Terms will look at folksonomy and its value for individuals, others, and organizations. Social bookmarking and social tagging has been showing up in a broad variety of services and there is value in this breadth of tagging, but there is a need for a next step in tools and services. Thomas will outline the relationship of folksonomy to taxonomy as well as where folksonomy could be heading and the improvements that are needed to derive the most value from the concept.
Thomas Vander Wal is a popular speaker and consultant on tagging/folksonomy, social web, and web applications around well structured information. He is often recognized as the person who coined the term ‘folksonomy’ in 2004, as well as some of his other terms: Personal InfoCloud, Local InfoCloud, Come to Me Web, digital model of attraction etc. Thomas is Principal, and Senior Consultant at InfoCloud Solutions, a social web consulting firm. Thomas has been working professionally on the web since 1995 (with professional IT background beginning in 1988) and has breadth and depth across many roles and disciplines around web design, social web development & research and general web development. He is a member of the Web Standards Project Steering Committee and helped found the Information Architecture Institute and Boxes & Arrows web magazine.