One of the best speech heard yesterdey during the IA summit was the one of Emanuele Quintarelli about Social distributed classification. He addressed the problem of a good classification in the information overload (and chaos) era, starting by the emerging experience of folksonomies and challenging the idea of a Faceted Folksonomy… the same approach that leads to the distributed classification with folksonomies can be applied to the creation of socially ranked and filtered facets.
The merge of a hierarchical classification (the facets) with a flat and non-hierarchical classification method (tagging) can lead to some significant improvements of findability.

The challenge is open, one of the question I was thinking about yesterday is about the real scalability of such approach of classification. Given a large, non semantically-outlined set of information, should this system lead to a usable compromise or, beyond a certain amount of information and audience of users, this will lead to the natural creation of different clusters of information? And, in the second case, how (and how much effectively) these clusters will exchange information among each other?

About Folksonomies and beyond:

• Folksonomies 2.0: the chaotic order [infospaces.it]
• Faceted tags [beyondfolksonomies]
• Folksonomy 2.0 [kurai]