ICITA Conference paper, 2009 Hanoi

The Virtual Museum of the Pacific is a Digital
Ecosystem that engages members of several communities,
each with their own ontological relationships with the
Pacific Collection of the Australian Museum. The Virtual
Museum of the Pacific is intended to support on-line
community interaction using social-media technologies to
extend the annotation of objects to suit the stakeholder’s
own needs. The success of the system depends on
leveraging the diffusion of language and encouraging a
conversation between on-line communities. In this paper
we explore the relationships between stakeholders,
folksonomy and taxonomy, to reveal the design forces on
our digital ecosystem. Our analysis defines the scope for
the social tagging component that progresses the design of
our data model and gives us some confidence that we are
capturing the right data for the system’s development into
the future.