Rafael Alvarado on 2009-04-05
This must have been the article that influenced Wesch ...
This link has been bookmarked by 224 people . It was first bookmarked on 02 Mar 2006, by Hugh Bristic.
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20 Nov 09
Mike CaneThis piece is based on two talks I gave in the spring of 2005 -- one at the O'Reilly ETech conference in March, entitled "Ontology Is Overrated", and one at the IMCExpo in April entitled "Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification." The written version is a heavily edited concatenation of those two talks.
Today I want to talk about categorization, and I want to convince you that a lot of what we think we know about categorization is wrong. In particular, I want to convince you that many of the ways we're attempting to apply categorization to the electronic world are actually a bad fit, because we've adopted habits of mind that are left over from earlier strategies. -
18 Nov 09
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an explicit specification of a conceptualization."
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Ontology
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A book which is equally about two things breaks the 'be in one place' requirement, so each book needs to be declared to about one thing more than others, regardless of its actual content
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they thought there was business value in determining the view the user would have to adopt to use the system.
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Berners-Lee
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if you've got enough links, you don't need the
hierarchy anymore -
the link structure is more complex than we can read,
except in response to a user query -
voodoo categorization, where acting on the model changes the world
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people doing the categorizing believe, even if only unconciously, that naming the world changes it
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the assertion that restricting vocabularies
improves signal assumes that that there's no signal in the difference
itself, and no value in protecting the user from too many matches -
Well-managed, well-groomed organizational schemes get worse with scale, both because the costs of supporting such schemes at large volumes are prohibitive, and, as I noted earlier, scaling over time is also a serious problem. Tagging, by contrast, gets better with scale. With a multiplicity of points of view the question isn't "Is everyone tagging any given link 'correctly'", but rather "Is anyone tagging it the way I do?
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We move from a binary choice between saying two tags are the same or different to the Venn diagram option of "kind of is/somewhat
is/sort of is/overlaps to this degree". That is a really profound change. -
It comes down ultimately to a question of philosophy. Does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world? If you believe the world makes sense, then anyone who tries to make sense of the world differently than you is presenting you with a situation that needs to be reconciled formally, because if you get it wrong, you're getting it wrong about the real world.
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23 Jun 09
Donna BaumbachOntology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags
tagging folksonomy tags web2.0 web del.icio.us. semanticweb delicious_backup
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Joachim MichelClay Shirky's writings about the Internet, including Economics and Culture, Media and Community, Open Source
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Anton KulagaСтатья про фолксономию и управление знаниями
ontology folksonomy tagging web2.0 полезно knowledge_management
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radical break with previous categorization strategies, rather than an extension of them.
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The question ontology asks is: What kinds of things exist or can exist in the world, and what manner of relations can those things have to each other? Ontology is less concerned with what is than with what is possible.
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The main thread of ontology in the philosophical sense is the study of entities and their relations.
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A library catalog, for example,
assumes that for any new book, its logical place already exists within
the system, even before the book was published. -
It's tempting to think that the classification schemes that libraries have optimized for in the past can be extended in an uncomplicated way into the digital world. This badly underestimates, in my view, the degree to which what libraries have historically been managing is an entirely different problem.
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Thinking that library catalogs exist to organize concepts confuses the container for the thing contained.
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hierarchy is a good way to manage physical objects.
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simply a byproduct of physical constraints.
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In the digital world, there is no physical constraint that's forcing this kind of organization on us any longer.
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Now we have this ontologically managed list of what's out there.
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It is perfectly possible for any number of links to be in any number of places in a hierarchy, or in many hierarchies, or in no hierarchy at all. But Yahoo decided to privilege one way of organizing links over all others, because they wanted to make assertions about what is "real."
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there is no shelf, and that there is no file
system. Google can decide what goes with what after hearing from the user, rather than trying to predict in
advance what it is you need to know. -
"Who cares? We're not going to tell the user what
to do, because the link structure is more complex than we can read,
except in response to a user query." -
Browse versus search is a radical increase in the trust we put in link infrastructure, and in the degree of power derived from that link structure. Browse says the people making the ontology, the people doing the categorization, have the responsibility to organize the world in advance.
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If you want something that hasn't been categorized in the way you think about it, you're out of luck.
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search and categorization
side-by-side, fewer and fewer people were using categorization to find things. -
then ontology is going to be a bad
strategy. -
where the people doing the categorizing believe, even if only unconciously, that naming the world changes it. Unfortunately, most of the world is not actually amenable to voodoo categorization.
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In environments where there's no authority and no force that
can be applied to the user, it's very difficult to support the voodoo style
of organization. -
Merely naming the world creates no actual change, either in the world, or in the minds of potential users who don't understand the system.
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to guess what their users are thinking, and to make predictions about the future.
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the assertion that restricting vocabularies
improves signal assumes that that there's no signal in the difference
itself, and no value in protecting the user from too many matches. -
because the cataloguers
assume their classification should have force on the world, they
underestimate the difficulty of understanding what users are thinking, -
You can't collapse these categorizations
without some signal loss. -
actually turned out to be an unstable category
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Cities are real. They are real, physical facts. Countries are social fictions. It is much easier for a country to disappear than for a city to disappear, so when you're saying that the small thing is contained by the large thing, you're actually mixing radically different kinds of entities.
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the URL gives us a way to create a globally unique ID for anything we need to point to
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to create a globally unique identifier for anything.
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anyone can label those pointers, can tag those URLs, in ways that make them more valuable, and all without requiring top-down organization schemes.
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selected to help the user in later retrieval of those URLs.
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There is no fixed set of categories or officially approved choices. You can use words, acronyms, numbers, whatever makes sense to you, without regard for anyone else's needs, interests, or requirements.
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Tags have the additional effect of grouping related URLs together.
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The addition of a few simple labels hardly seems so momentous, but the surprise here, as so often with the Web, is the surprise of simplicity. Tags are important mainly for what they leave out.
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By forgoing formal classification, tags enable a huge amount of user-produced organizational value, at vanishingly small cost.
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with individual motivation, but group value.
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way to make it valuable to individuals to tag their stuff, you'll generate a lot more data about any given object than if you pay a professional to tag it once and only once
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ndividual differences don't have to be homogenized
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Market logic allows many distinct points of view to co-exist, because it allows individuals to preserve their point of view, even in the face of general disagreement.
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compressing things into a restricted number of categories.
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But in a world where enough points of view are likely to provide some commonality,
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the aggregate signal loss falls with scale in tagging systems, while it grows with scale in systems with single points of view.
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"Is everyone tagging any given link 'correctly'", but rather "Is anyone tagging it the way I do?" As long as at least one other person tags something they way you would, you'll find it
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The Web has an editor, it's everybody.
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Merges create partial overlap between tags, rather than defining tags as synonyms. I
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We move from a binary choice between saying two tags are the same or different to the Venn diagram option of "kind of is/somewhat
is/sort of is/overlaps to this degree". That is a really profound change. -
Experts don't catalog this way; experts who learn
how to catalogue produce much more consistent labeling. Here, it's
whatever the user thought would help them remember the link later. -
"This is context-dependent and temporary." Well, so was the category "East Germany."
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It was 5 years between the spread of the link and Google's figuring out how to use whole collections of links to create additional value.
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We're moving away from that sort of absolute declaration, and towards being able to roll up this kind of value by observing how people handle it in practice.
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Does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world?
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e, but you do it without an ontological goal. You do it without a goal of explicitly getting to or even closely matching some theoretically perfect view of the world.
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emantics here are in the users, not in the system. T
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It's up to the user to decide whether or not that recommendation is useful
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The tag overlap is in the system, but the tag semantics are in the users.
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26 Sep 08
James BonTempoToday I want to talk about categorization, and I want to convince you that a lot of what we think we know about categorization is wrong. In particular, I want to convince you that many of the ways we're attempting to apply categorization to the electronic
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ten years ago, a couple of guys out of Stanford launched a service called Yahoo
that offered a list of things available on the Web. It
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17 Aug 08
dave sgonechinaClay Shirky's 2005 talks on ontology condensed. First 2 chapters of Everything is Misc. basically come from here.
libraries openSource internet google searchEngines classification
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I want
to convince you that a lot of what we think we know about categorization is wrong. In particular, I want to convince you that many of the ways we're attempting to apply categorization to the electronic world are actually a bad fit, because we've adopted habits of mind that are left over from earlier strategies.
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20 Oct 07
Marion WaltonClay Shirky's writings about the Internet, including Economics and Culture, Media and Community, Open Source
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06 Jul 07
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Alice Mercerwroush on diigo says, "Clay Shirky argues that "the only group that can categorize everything is everybody." which covers it.
bookmarking categories delicious edtechtalk for: ontology social_bookmarking tagging taxonomy web
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Roberto UEMArtigo indicado pelo blog Usabilidoido
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02 Jan 07
Eric SizemoreWhat's being optimized is number of books on the shelf. That's what the categorization scheme is categorizing. It's tempting to think that the classification schemes that libraries have optimized for in the past can be extended in an uncomplicated way int
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What's being optimized is number of books on the shelf. That's what the categorization scheme is categorizing. It's tempting to think that the classification schemes that libraries have optimized for in the past can be extended in an uncomplicated way into the digital world. This badly underestimates, in my view, the degree to which what libraries have historically been managing is an entirely different problem.
The musculature of the Library of Congress categorization scheme looks like it's about concepts. It is organized into non-overlapping categories that get more detailed at lower and lower levels -- any concept is supposed to fit in one category and in no other categories. But every now and again, the skeleton pokes through, and the skeleton, the supporting structure around which the system is really built, is designed to minimize seek time on shelves.
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patarakinОнтологии - категории, ссылки, метки. Классическая статья Ширки
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adrian woodGreat article about the uselessness of categorisation/cataloguing in the context of digital information, especially web.
classification categorisation ontology search information architecture content management Virtual repositories
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Tom HemingwayThe strategy of tagging -- free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints -- seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets.
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Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags
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Now imagine a world where everything can have a unique identifier.
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Now imagine a world where everything can have a unique identifier.
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14 Mar 06
Christophe DucampNow imagine a world where everything can have a unique identifier. This should be easy, since that's the world we currently live in -- the URL gives us a way to create a globally unique ID for anything we need to point to. Sometimes the pointers are direc
shirky del.icio.us classification tagging folksonomy ontology importdelicious
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AlexReiddiscussion of the effects of social bookmarking on the organization of knowledge
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Public Stiky Notes
Page Comments
http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html
http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fshirky.com%2Fwritings%2Fontology_overrated.html?tab=comment&uname=grahamperrin for corresponding annotations and comments.
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