As the descriptive terms can be freely chosen, the assignment of tags from different users creates a spontaneous, uncontrolled vocabulary: a folksonomy.

In BibSonomy, the folksonomy evolves from the participation of research groups, learning communities and individual users, organizing their information needs.

The service was developed by a team of students and scientists from the Institute of Knowledge and Data Engineering, the DMIR group at the University of Würzburg and the L3S Learning Lab Lower Saxony in Hannover and is mainly hosted by the University of Kassel.

As of 17 November 2008[update], the source code of BibSonomy is available under the GNU Lesser General Public License.

[1] As of 12 March 2014[update], the source code of the BibSonomy web application is available under the GNU Affero General Public License.