Shirky: Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags - The Diigo Meta page

• 20 Nov 09
  

  Mike Cane

  This 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
  

  john wayne

  "Ontology"

  ontology tags classification

  • an explicit specification of a conceptualization."
  • Ontology
• 23 Oct 09
  

  maike online

  ontology tagging folksonomy tags classification web folksonomies web2.0

• 03 Oct 09
  

  projectwerk

  opac ontology tagging

• 04 Sep 09
  

  Gideon Burton

  ontology tagging folksonomy tags classification folksonomies shirky

  • 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
  • they thought there was business value in determining the view the user would have to adopt to use the system.
  • 9 more annotations...
  • • Berners-Lee
    • 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
    • people doing the categorizing believe, even if only unconciously, that naming the world changes it
    • 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?
    • 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.
• 28 Aug 09
  

  Fergus Bisset

  design research social folksonomy shirky taxonomy ontology

• 19 Aug 09
  

  lei zhou

  test

• 06 Jul 09
  

  T B

  ontology categorisation link tag

• 03 Jul 09
  

  Jaap Walhout

  ontology folksonomy tagging categorization

• 23 Jun 09
  

  Donna Baumbach

  Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags

  tagging folksonomy tags web2.0 web del.icio.us. semanticweb delicious_backup

• 21 Jun 09
  

  Ernesto Krsulovic

  ontology web2.0 web del.icio.us semanticweb social search blog

• 18 Jun 09
  

  shingo nakayama

  ontology folksonomy tagging

• 16 Apr 09
  

  Joachim Michel

  Clay Shirky's writings about the Internet, including Economics and Culture, Media and Community, Open Source

  ontology tagging tags social bookmarking social bookmarking

• 13 Apr 09
  

  era e

  20060619-0123 blog folksonomy ontology erablog quips

• 28 Jan 09
  

  msjacob

  social_bookmarking

• 17 Jan 09
  

  Anton Kulaga

  Статья про фолксономию и управление знаниями

  ontology folksonomy tagging web2.0 полезно knowledge_management

• 28 Oct 08
  

  Rafael Alvarado

  semantic-web

  •  

    • 

      Rafael Alvarado on 2009-04-05

       This must have been the article that influenced Wesch ...
      
• 24 Oct 08
  

  Anette Seiler

  ontologien folksonomien web2.0

• 

  africangirl

  ontologien folksonomien web2.0 delicious

• 13 Oct 08
  

  light reading
  • radical break with previous categorization strategies, rather than an extension of them.
  • 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.
  • 52 more annotations...
  • • The main thread of ontology in the philosophical sense is the study of entities and their relations.
    • 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.
    • Thinking that library catalogs exist to organize concepts confuses the container for the thing contained.
    • hierarchy is a good way to manage physical objects.
    • simply a byproduct of physical constraints.
    • In the digital world, there is no physical constraint that's forcing this kind of organization on us any longer.
    • Now we have this ontologically managed list of what's out there.
    • 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."
    • 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.
    • If you want something that hasn't been categorized in the way you think about it, you're out of luck.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • to guess what their users are thinking, and to make predictions about the future.
    • 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
    • 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.
    • the URL gives us a way to create a globally unique ID for anything we need to point to
    • to create a globally unique identifier for anything.
    • anyone can label those pointers, can tag those URLs, in ways that make them more valuable, and all without requiring top-down organization schemes.
    • selected to help the user in later retrieval of those URLs.
    • 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.
    • Tags have the additional effect of grouping related URLs together.
    • 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.
    • By forgoing formal classification, tags enable a huge amount of user-produced organizational value, at vanishingly small cost.
    • with individual motivation, but group value.
    • 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
    • ndividual differences don't have to be homogenized
    • 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.
    • compressing things into a restricted number of categories.
    • But in a world where enough points of view are likely to provide some commonality,
    • the aggregate signal loss falls with scale in tagging systems, while it grows with scale in systems with single points of view.
    • "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
    • The Web has an editor, it's everybody.
    • Merges create partial overlap between tags, rather than defining tags as synonyms. I
    • 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."
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • Does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world?
    • 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.
    • emantics here are in the users, not in the system. T
    • It's up to the user to decide whether or not that recommendation is useful
    • The tag overlap is in the system, but the tag semantics are in the users.
• 26 Sep 08
  

  James BonTempo

  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

  web2.0 internet km taxonomy

• 22 Sep 08
  

  M. C.
• 22 Aug 08
  

  Mel Monigatti
  • 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
• 17 Aug 08
  

  dave sgonechina

  Clay Shirky's 2005 talks on ontology condensed. First 2 chapters of Everything is Misc. basically come from here.

  libraries openSource internet google searchEngines classification

• 23 Jun 08
  

  ross harley

  tagging web2.0 folksonomy education

• 16 Jun 08
  

  zdanek sssss

  ontology tagging folksonomy classification tags

• 13 Jun 08
  

  Lukasz Kolodziejczyk

  ISSS_referat

• 11 Jun 08
  

  Clay Burell

  web2.0 web20 socialbookmarking tagging

• 28 Mar 08
  

  James Fadden

  classification commentary folksonomies folksonomy language tagging tags

• 22 Mar 08
  

  Chris Smith

  folksonomy research tags

• 21 Mar 08
  

  malin cantwell

  toread

• 14 Feb 08
  

  Veronika Smith

  classification tagging tags education informatics

• 06 Feb 08
  

  Roberta Taylor

  folksonomy internet tags web2.0

• 27 Dec 07
  

  Sally Trexler

  analysis article folksonomy socialbookmarking

• 28 Nov 07
  

  ninmah

  hz08 tagging

  • 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.
• 

  Jim Reverend

  categorization organization semanticweb

• 20 Oct 07
  

  Marion Walton

  Clay Shirky's writings about the Internet, including Economics and Culture, Media and Community, Open Source

  tagging ontology

• 06 Jul 07
  

  miz mercer

  bookmarking categories edtechtalk for: ontology social_bookmarking tagging taxonomy web

• 

  Alice Mercer

  wroush 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

• 23 Jun 07
  

  tileoa
• 17 Apr 07
  

  ianyorston

  classification del.icio.us folksonomy knowledgemanagement tagging

• 12 Apr 07
  

  Roberto UEM

  Artigo indicado pelo blog Usabilidoido

  toread bookmarks delicious social folksonomy ontology

• 12 Mar 07
  

  takayuki kawamoto

  tagging ontology folksonomy classification del.icio.us tags

• 21 Feb 07
  

  Frank Kilkelly

  ontology owl semantic web

• 12 Feb 07
  

  Janne L

  Folksonomy tagging web2.0

• 07 Feb 07
  

  Kurt Mathiesen

  article bs classification folksonomy imported:del.icio.us ontology searching socialsoftware tagging

• 18 Jan 07
  

  Marco Piovanelli

  del.icio.us dewey folksonomy ontology semanticweb tagging taxonomy

• 02 Jan 07
  

  Eric Sizemore

  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 int

  Library & Info Science

  • 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.
• 29 Dec 06
  

  patarakin

  Онтологии - категории, ссылки, метки. Классическая статья Ширки

  classification tagging Ширки

• 11 Dec 06
  

  W.W. Webster

  Clay Shirky

  ontology algorithms computing swengi

• 03 Dec 06
  

  Tommy Williams

  classification folksonomy imported:del.icio.us tagging tags taxonomy

• 30 Oct 06
  

  Andy Standfield

  Shirky: Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags

  ontology articles

• 24 Oct 06
  

  Josh Levy

  community imported:del.icio.us information tags

• 01 Oct 06
  

  adiwidjaja

  semanticweb tags classification

• 20 Sep 06
  

  adrian wood

  Great 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

• 18 Sep 06
  

  morrita

  forksonomy imported:del.icio.us sns

• 

  Stephane JAIS

  folksonomy imported:del.icio.us ontology tags

• 14 Sep 06
  

  AudreyHo

  linking ontology retrieval search tagging

• 01 Sep 06
  

  Jimmy

  reading

• 25 Aug 06
  

  Lara

  articles bookmarking folksonomies ontologies social tagging taxonomies

• 24 Aug 06
  

  toxi

  article mb.com ontology readme tagging webdev

• 21 Aug 06
  

  Enibevoli

  folksonomy social tagging

• 10 Aug 06
  

  forgetcolor

  articles tagging tags

• 08 Aug 06
  

  Lambert Heller

  classification folksonomies folksonomy hierarchical_relationships imported delicious lang:en ontology tagging

• 05 Aug 06
  

  Lambert Heller

  classification en folksonomies folksonomy hierarchical_relationships ontology tagging

• 04 Aug 06
  

  Matt McAlister

  clayshirky folksonomy ontology tags taxonomy

• 03 Aug 06
  

  Ilari Sani

  delicious metadata search social tagging web

• 

  Steve Bowbrick

  categories categorisation categorization information library ontology shirky tags web

• 

  Steve Goldstetin

  classification folksonomy ontology research search shirky

• 02 Aug 06
  

  bob

  folksonomy nexus

• 

  Jason Fleming

  ontology tags toread

• 31 Jul 06
  

  Kevin Wen

  classification essay folksonomy socialnetwork tags

• 29 Jul 06
  

  Euan Semple

  tagging folksonomies ontologies clay

• 27 Jul 06
  

  Yar Eeh

  clippings cs informatics search web

• 17 Jul 06
  

  Tom Hemingway

  The 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.

  tags del.icio.us web2.0 wikifodder folksonomies shirky

• 14 Jul 06
  

  Teresa Levy

  academic blog folksonomy ontology philosophy tagging theory tools

• 

  Deng Jianguo

  keytheories

• 

  Dan Maloney

  article ontology

• 26 Jun 06
  

  Jason

  cloud tags

• 14 Jun 06
  

  Matt Schneider

  del.icio.us future ontology system tagging tags

• 11 Jun 06
  

  B B

  Search technology Publishing Collaboration stuff Social Software

  • Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags
• 07 Jun 06
  

  Erik Stattin
• 04 Jun 06
  

  Eldritch Crank

  indexing search

• 02 Jun 06
  

  Rita Niland

  classification ontology

• 19 May 06
  

  Jeremy Price

  academic blog folksonomy ontology philosophy tagging theory tools

• 28 Apr 06
  

  alex-and-r

  categorization design google information_design knowledge_management organization

• 27 Apr 06
  

  netklon

  article categorization classification ia ontology

• 29 Mar 06
  

  Wade Roush

  categories categorization clayshirky hierarchy links ontology tags

• 28 Mar 06
  

  kevin kirwin

  Digital Assets

  • Now imagine a world where everything can have a unique identifier.
• 

  kevin kirwin

  Digital Assets

  • Now imagine a world where everything can have a unique identifier.
• 26 Mar 06
  

  Scott Leslie

  folksonomy

• 14 Mar 06
  

  Christophe Ducamp

  Now 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

• 05 Mar 06
  

  yasuo kominami

  semantic-web

• 

  Andrés Silva

  Politics Technology Knowledge Management Web2.0

• 04 Mar 06
  

  AlexReid

  discussion of the effects of social bookmarking on the organization of knowledge

  folksonomy web2.0 pwr129 pwr209

• 24 Feb 06
  

  johnfromberkeley

  ontology tags shirky web design

• 07 Feb 06
  

  Michel Bauwens

  P2P-Epistemology Folksonomies P2P

• 03 Feb 06
  

  Hugh Bristic

  ontology social_bookmarking

• 17 Jan 06
  

  Mostafa Hussein

  ontology folksonomy tags classification

• 24 Dec 05
  

  Ognjen Strpić

  web philosophy

Public Stiky Notes

• 
  Rafael Alvarado on 2009-04-05
   This must have been the article that influenced Wesch ...
  

Page Comments

• 
  yasuo kominami on 2006-03-06
  ontology
• 
  Wade Roush on 2006-03-29
  Clay Shirky argues that "the only group that can categorize everything is everybody."
• 
  Jason Fleming on 2006-08-02
  Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags
• 
  Steve Bowbrick on 2006-08-03
  Clay
• 
  Matt McAlister on 2006-08-04
  I want to convince you that what we're seeing when we see the Web is actually a radical break with previous categorization strategies, rather than an extension of them. The second part of the talk is more speculative, because it is often the case that old
• 
  Lara on 2006-08-25
  folksonomies,taxonomies,tagging,social bookmarking,ontologies,articles
• 
  AudreyHo on 2006-09-14
  one of the more skeptical voices out there on semantic web technologies.
• 
  Marco Piovanelli on 2007-01-18
  Some convincing arguments about why folksonomies may be better than taxonomies and controlled vocabularies
• 
  Kurt Mathiesen on 2007-02-07
  by Clay Shirky
• 
  Alice Mercer on 2007-07-06
  wroush on diigo says, "Clay Shirky argues that "the only group that can categorize everything is everybody." which covers it.
  
• 
  Graham Perrin on 2009-07-29
  A more common URL for the bookmarked item:
  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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