Will Folksonomies mess up existing tags and Taxonomies?

Question

I'm working with a museum client who wants to introduce the idea of social tagging (Folksonomies) which I'm kind of new to. My first concern is how introducing and giving users control over tags will mess up any existing tags and search for their main (i.e.: priority) content.

Answer 1

I suggest keeping meta data on the type of each tag (i.e. social/primary) and source (i.e. Twitter/Facebook/etc...). This would allow you to weight the value of each tag later and make more informed programmatic searches or analysis.