Hans Wobbe on 2009-05-18
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06 Nov 09
anmelukan den bruges i m3 opgaven?
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The
list of factors making ontology a bad fit is, also, an almost perfect
description of the Web -- largest corpus,
most naive users, no global authority,
and
so
on. The more you push in the direction of scale, spread, fluidity,
flexibility, the harder it becomes to handle the expense of starting a
cataloguing system and the hassle of maintaining it, to say nothing of the
amount of force you have to get to exert over users to get them to drop their
own world view in favor of yours. -
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. - 7 more annotations...
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I also 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 -
much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization
schemes allow, based on two units -- the link, which can point to anything, and
the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. 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. -
People have been freaking out about the virtuality of data for decades, and
you'd think we'd have internalized the obvious truth: there is no shelf. In the
digital world, there is no physical constraint that's forcing this kind of
organization on us any longer. We can do without it, and you'd think we'd have
learned that lesson by now. -
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. Given this requirement,
the
views of the catalogers necessarily
override the user's needs and the user's
view of the
world. If you want something that hasn't been categorized in the way -
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 -
says the people making the ontology, the people doing the categorization, have
the responsibility to organize the world in advance. Given this requirement, the
views of the catalogers necessarily override the user's needs and the user's
view of the world. If you want something that hasn't been categorized in the way
you think about it, you're out of luck. -
The list of factors making ontology a bad fit is, also, an almost perfect
description of the Web -- largest corpus, most naive users, no global authority,
and so
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05 Oct 09
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Web is actually a radical break with previous categorization strategies, rather than an extension of them
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The sense of ontology there is something like "an explicit specification of a conceptualization."
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The periodic table of the elements is my vote for "Best. Classification. Evar."
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What's being optimized is number of books on the shelf. That's what the categorization scheme is categorizing.
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he system is really built, is designed to minimize seek time on shelves.
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a book can be about several things at once.
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a book has to be declared to be about some main thing
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Yahoo, faced with the possibility that they could organize things with no physical constraints, added the shelf back.
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a priori organization
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One reason Google was adopted so quickly when it came along is
that Google understood there is no shelf, and that there is no file
system. -
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.
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When Does Ontological Classification Work Well?
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- Small corpus
- Formal categories
- Stable entities
- Restricted entities
- Clear edges
Domain to be Organized
- Small corpus
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The more of those characteristics that are true, the
better a fit ontology is likely to be. -
- Expert catalogers
- Authoritative source of judgment
- Coordinated users
- Expert users
Participants
- Expert catalogers
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Users have a terrifically
hard time guessing how something they want will have been categorized
in advance, unless they have been educated about those categories in advance as well, and the bigger the user base, the more work that user education is. -
- Large corpus
- No formal categories
- Unstable entities
- Unrestricted entities
- No clear edges
- Uncoordinated users
- Amateur users
- Naive catalogers
- No Authority
"Here are some characteristics where ontological classification doesn't work well":
Domain - Large corpus
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The list of factors making ontology a bad fit is, also, an
almost perfect description of the Web -- largest corpus, most naive
users, no global authority, and so on. The more you push in the
direction of scale, spread, fluidity, flexibility, the harder it becomes to handle the expense of starting a
cataloguing system and the hassle of maintaining it, to say nothing of the
amount of force you have to get to exert over users to get them to drop
their own world view in favor of yours. -
This is voodoo categorization, where acting on the model changes the world
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eople doing the categorizing believe, even if only unconciously, that naming the world changes it.
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One of the biggest problems with categorizing things in advance is that it forces the categorizers to take on two jobs that have historically been quite hard: mind reading, and fortune telling. It forces categorizers to guess what their users are thinking, and to make predictions about the future.
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thesaurus
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Some people say they're
interested in movies. Some people say they're interested in film. Some
people say they're interested in cinema. -
Those terms actually encode
different things, and 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. -
You can't collapse these categorizations
without some signal loss. -
underestimate the loss from erasing difference of expression, and they overestimate loss from the lack of a thesaurus.
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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. We pretend that 'country' refers to a physical area the same way 'city' does, but it's not true, as we know from places like the former Yugoslavia.
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magine a world where everything can have a unique identifier.
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And once you can do that, anyone can label those pointers, can tag those URLs, in ways that make them more valuable, and all without requiring top-down organization schemes.
And this -- an explosion in free-form labeling of links, followed by all sorts of ways of grabbing value from those labels -- is what I think is happening now. -
tags enable a huge amount of user-produced organizational value, at vanishingly small cost.
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And if you can find any way to create value from combining myriad amateur classifications over time, they will come to be more valuable than professional categorization schemes, particularly with regards to robustness and cost of creation.
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individual differences don't have to be homogenized.
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The signal loss in traditional categorization schemes comes from compressing things into a restricted number of categories
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The solution to this sort of signal loss is growth. 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.
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In a world where publishing is expensive, the act of publishing is also a statement of quality -- the filter comes before the publication. In a world where publishing is cheap, putting something out there says nothing about its quality. It's what happens after it gets published that matters.
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The Web has an editor, it's everybody.
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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". -
Organization Goes Organic
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We are moving away from binary categorization -- books either are or are not entertainment -- and into this probabilistic world,
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the semantics here are in the users, not in the system
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08 Sep 09
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05 Sep 09
Steve BrantleyThe search paradigm says the reverse. It says nobody gets to tell you in advance what it is you need. Search says that, at the moment that you are looking for it, we will do our best to service it based on this link structure, because we believe we can build a world where we don't need the hierarchy to coexist with the link structure.
ontology tagging folksonomy classification categorization web tags
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One reason Google was adopted so quickly when it came along is
that Google understood 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. -
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. Given this requirement, the views of the catalogers necessarily override the user's needs and the user's view of the world. 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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The search paradigm says the reverse. It says nobody gets to tell you in advance what it is you need. Search says that, at the moment that you are looking for it, we will do our best to service it based on this link structure, because we believe we can build a world where we don't need the hierarchy to coexist with the link structure.
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25 Aug 09
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20 Aug 09
Christopher Arnold"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."/
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17 Aug 09
biblio uprClassification and Creating sense of the World, or Our Brains are not Linear
taxonomies yahoo hierarchical classification tagging web2.0challenge
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18 May 09
Arne van ElkClay Shirky over waarom klassieke ontsluitingssystemen als classificaties en ontologieen niet geschikt zijn om de informatie op het internet te ontsluiten. Belangrijkste punt: classificaties zijn er op gericht informatie maar op 1 plek te bewaren, maar in de digitale wereld geldt dat niet meer. Shirky ziet dus liever tags als middel om informatie te ontsluiten. Hij noemt oa. een rijtje voordelen van tags.
ontologies classificaties taxonomies folksonomies tags tagging ontsluiting
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It's all dependent on human context. This is what we're starting to see with del.icio.us, with Flickr, with systems that are allowing for and aggregating tags. The signal benefit of these systems is that they don't recreate the structured, hierarchical categorization so often forced onto us by our physical systems. Instead, we're dealing with a significant break -- by letting users tag URLs and then aggregating those tags, we're going to be able to build alternate organizational systems, systems that, like the Web itself, do a better job of letting individuals create value for one another, often without realizing it.
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Clay Shirky's Writings About the Internet
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01 May 09
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28 Apr 09
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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?
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And then there's ontological classification or categorization,
which is organizing a set of entities into groups, based on their
essences and possible relations - 20 more annotations...
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The periodic table of the elements is my vote for "Best. Classification. Evar."
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If it's impossible to create a completely coherent categorization
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As the Web expanded more they realized that, to maintain the value in the directory, they were going to have to systematize, so they hired a professional ontologist, and they developed their now-familiar top-level categories, which go to subcategories, each subcategory contains links to still other subcategories, and so on. Now we have this ontologically managed list of what's out there.
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oth of those explanations may have been true at different times and in different measures, but the effect was to override the users' sense of where things ought to be, and to insist on the Yahoo view instead.
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It's easy to see how the Yahoo hierarchy maps to technological constraints as well as physical ones. The constraints in the Yahoo directory describes both a
library categorization scheme and, obviously, a file system -
They missed the end of this progression,
which is that, if you've got enough links, you don't need the
hierarchy anymore. There is no shelf. There is no file system. The
links alone are enough -
Let's say I need every Web
page with the word "obstreperous" and "Minnesota" in it. You can't
ask a cataloguer in advance to say "Well, that's going to be a useful
category, we should encode that in advance."
Instead, what the cataloguer is going to say is, "Obstreperous plus Minnesota! Forget it, we're not
going to optimize for one-offs like that." Google, on the
other hand, says, "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. Given this requirement, the views of the catalogers necessarily override the user's needs and the user's view of the world. If you want something that hasn't been categorized in the way you think about it, you're out of luck.
The search paradigm says the reverse. It says nobody gets to tell you in advance what it is you need. Search says that, at the moment that you are looking for it, we will do our best to service it based on this link structure, because we believe we can build a world where we don't need the hierarchy to coexist with the link structure. -
When people were offered search and categorization
side-by-side, fewer and fewer people were using categorization to find things. -
- Small corpus
- Formal categories
- Stable entities
- Restricted entities
- Clear edges
Domain to be Organized
- Small corpus
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- Large corpus
- No formal categories
- Unstable entities
- Unrestricted entities
- No clear edges
- Uncoordinated users
- Amateur users
- Naive catalogers
- No Authority
You can also turn that list around. You can say "Here are some characteristics where ontological classification doesn't work well":
Domain - Large corpus
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The reason we don't know whether or not Buffy, The Vampire Slayer
is science fiction, for example, is because there's no one who can say definitively
yes or no. 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 -
One of the biggest problems with categorizing things in advance is that it forces the categorizers to take on two jobs that have historically been quite hard: mind reading, and fortune telling. It forces categorizers to guess what their users are thinking, and to make predictions about the future.
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The movie people don't want
to hang out with the cinema people." Those terms actually encode
different things, and 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. -
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.
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"Each individual categorization scheme is worth less than a professional categorization scheme. But there are many, many more of them." If you find a 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. And if you can find any way to create value from combining myriad amateur classifications over time, they will come to be more valuable than professional categorization schemes, particularly with regards to robustness and cost of creation.
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The signal loss in traditional categorization schemes comes from compressing things into a restricted number of categories. With tagging, when there is signal loss, it comes from people not having any commonality in talking about things. The loss is from the multiplicity of points of view, rather than from compression around a single point of view. 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.
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The solution to this sort of signal loss is growth. 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?" As long as at least one other person tags something they way you would, you'll find it
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Merges create partial overlap between tags, rather than defining tags as synonyms. Instead of saying that any given tag "is" or "is not" the same as another tag, del.icio.us is able to recommend related tags by saying "A lot of people who tagged this 'Mac' also tagged it 'OSX'." 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". -
We are moving away from binary categorization -- books either are or are not entertainment -- and into this probabilistic world, where N% of users think books are entertainment. It may well be that within Yahoo, there was a big debate about whether or not books are entertainment. But they either had no way of reflecting that debate or they decided not to expose it to the users. What instead happened was it became an all-or-nothing categorization, "This is entertainment, this is not entertainment." 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.
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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24 Apr 09
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15 Mar 09
Sue MaberryToday 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 strategie
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04 Mar 09
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Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags
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26 Feb 09
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24 Feb 09
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17 Feb 09
Sacha Arozarena"The only group that can categorize everything is everybody"
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13 Feb 09
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10 Feb 09
Gordon HaffInteresting piece. I always struggle with figuring out how to best keep some vague veneer of order on my digital stuff.
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by letting users tag URLs and then aggregating those tags, we're going to be able to build alternate organizational systems, systems that, like the Web itself, do a better job of letting individuals create value for one another, often without realizing it.
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09 Feb 09
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Ontology
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free-form labeling,
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What is Ontology?
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periodic table of the elements
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What's being optimized is number of books on the shelf
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The essence of a book is "book."
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Berners-Lee
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Google understood there is no shelf
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have the responsibility to organize the world in advance.
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classification scheme that works
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naming the world changes it
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"We are Yahoo We do not have biases. This is just how the world is. The world is organized into a dozen categories.
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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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04 Feb 09
E RShirky argues the way the Internet is organizing contact is not an evolution of but rather a revolution away from previous categorization methods.
ontology tagging folksonomy tags classification categorization web web2.0 clay_shirky
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19 Jan 09
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08 Jan 09
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22 Dec 08
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Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags
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This piece is based on two talks
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spring of 2005
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a heavily edited concatenation
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the
critical question: Is categorization a good idea? -
there are a number of cases
where you get significant value out of not categorizing -
"Each individual categorization scheme is worth less than a professional categorization scheme. But there are many, many more of them."
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20 Dec 08
a rClay Shirky's writings about the Internet, including Economics and Culture, Media and Community, Open Source
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28 Oct 08
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organic ways of organizing information
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organic ways of organizing information
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organic ways of organizing information
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organic ways of organizing information
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Now, anyone who deals with categorization for a living will
tell you they can never get a perfect system. In working
classification systems, success is not "Did we get the ideal arrangement?"
but rather "How close did we come, and on what measures?" -
periodic table of the elements is my vote for "Best. Classification. Evar."
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What's being optimized is number of books on the shelf. That's what the categorization scheme is categorizing.
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organized into non-overlapping categories
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any concept is supposed to fit in one category and in no other categories
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When Does Ontological Classification Work Well? #
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- Small corpus
- Formal categories
- Stable entities
- Restricted entities
- Clear edges
Domain to be Organized
- Small corpus
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- Expert catalogers
- Authoritative source of judgment
- Coordinated users
- Expert users
Participants
- Expert catalogers
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some characteristics where ontological classification doesn't work well":
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- Large corpus
- No formal categories
- Unstable entities
- Unrestricted entities
- No clear edges
- Uncoordinated users
- Amateur users
- Naive catalogers
- No Authority
Domain
- Large corpus
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categorizers to take on two jobs that have historically been quite hard: mind reading, and fortune telling.
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You can't collapse these categorizations
without some signal loss.
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19 Oct 08
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04 Aug 08
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25 Jul 08
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the obvious truth: there is no shelf
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17 Jul 08
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27 Jun 08
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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. -
the semantics here are in the users, not in the system.
- 2 more annotations...
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It's all dependent on human context
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The signal benefit of these systems is that they don't recreate the structured, hierarchical categorization so often forced onto us by our physical systems. Instead, we're dealing with a significant break -- by letting users tag URLs and then aggregating those tags, we're going to be able to build alternate organizational systems, systems that, like the Web itself, do a better job of letting individuals create value for one another, often without realizing it.
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Paul Beaufaitreference from Folksonomies: Tidying up Tags?
ontology tagging folksonomies classification tags categorization
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17 Jun 08
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14 Jun 08
Garry JenkinThis 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
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Well-managed, well-groomed organizational schemes get worse with scale
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chellery stickLet's say I need every Web page with the word "obstreperous" and "Minnesota" in it. You can't ask a cataloguer in advance to say "Well, that's going to be a useful category, we should encode that in advance." Instead, what the cataloguer is going to say i
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27 Dec 07
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20 Dec 07
Keith FortowskyAn important critique by Clay Shirky of overly structured metadata and semantics, recalling " Permanet, Nearlynet, and wireless data"; see also " The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview", at http://www.shirky.com/
PolarOps DataPolicy SemanticWeb&Metadata WikiTech WikiCulture
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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.
I also 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 systems get broken before people know what's going to take their place. (Anyone watching the music industry can see this at work today.) That's what I think is happening with categorization.
What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units -- the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. 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.
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06 Dec 07
Chris LasherAn opinion piece contending that, particularly with increasing scale, categorical organization breaks down, where as individual based organization (i.e., tagging) improves. Hooray for del.icio.us!
classification commentary data del.icio.us design for:abml for:farcepest for:gamezace for:gidrew82 for:guardian72 for:gvwilson for:hendrixski for:jewdan for:ralphz0rz for:ramblurr for:third for:thwllms google information ontology organizati tagging theory
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30 Nov 07
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user-developed classification
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tagging -- free-form labeling,
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this is the Dewey Decimal System's categorization for religions of the world, which is the 200 category.
Dewey, 200: Religion
210 Natural theology
220 Bible
230 Christian theology
240 Christian moral & devotional theology
250 Christian orders & local church
260 Christian social theology
270 Christian church history
280 Christian sects & denominations
290 Other religions
How much is this not the categorization you want in the 21st century? -
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.
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frailty of human memory
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The other big problem is that predicting the future turns out to be hard, and yet any classification system meant to be stable over time puts the categorizer in the position of fortune teller.
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22 Nov 07
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Maggie VersterToday 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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19 Nov 07
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Kelly AndersonListed in References from Collaborative Tagging article by Golder and Huberman
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Lacking the right measurements, they assumed that gaseousness was an essential aspect -- literally, part of the essence -- of those elements.
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What's being optimized is number of books on the shelf. That's what the categorization scheme is categorizing.
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It is organized into non-overlapping categories that get more detailed at lower and lower levels
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The categorization scheme is a response to physical constraints on storage
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There is no file system. The
links alone are enough. -
Browse versus search is a radical increase in the trust we put in link infrastructure
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at the moment that you are looking for it, we will do our best to service it based on this link structure
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LiveJournal makes absolutely no attempt
to enforce solidarity or a thesaurus or a minimal set of terms, no
check-box, no drop-box, just free-text typing. Some people say they're
interested in movies. Some people say they're interested in film. Some
people say they're interested in cinema. -
You can't collapse these categorizations
without some signal loss -
The presence of unique labels means that merging libraries doesn't require merging categorization schemes.
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Now imagine a world where everything can have a unique identifier
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Tags are important mainly for what they leave out
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"Each individual categorization scheme is worth less than a professional categorization scheme. But there are many, many more of them."
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robustness and cost of creation
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The loss is from the multiplicity of points of view, rather than from compression around a single point of view. 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.
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The solution to this sort of signal loss is growth
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question isn't "Is everyone tagging any given link 'correctly'", but rather "Is anyone tagging it the way I do?
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using a thesaurus to force everyone's tags into tighter synchrony would actually worsen the noise you'll get with your signal. If there is no shelf, then even imagining that there is one right way to organize things is an error.
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davide g. on 2007-10-28
IMPORTANT. see rizoma
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The existence of an odd or unusual tag is a problem if it's the only way a given link has been tagged, or if there is no way for a user to avoid that tag
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without a goal
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the semantics here are in the users, not in the system
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The tag overlap is in the system, but the tag semantics are in the users. This is not a way to inject linguistic meaning into the machine.
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27 Oct 07
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24 Oct 07
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The tag overlap is in the system, but the tag semantics are in the users.
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15 Oct 07
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what we're seeing when we see the Web is actually a radical break with previous categorization strategies, rather than an extension of them.
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The Filtering is Done Post Hoc - There's an analogy here with every journalist who has ever looked at the Web and said "Well, it needs an editor." The Web has an editor, it's everybody. In a world where publishing is expensive, the act of publishing is also a statement of quality -- the filter comes before the publication. In a world where publishing is cheap, putting something out there says nothing about its quality. It's what happens after it gets published that matters. If people don't point to it, other people won't read it. But the idea that the filtering is after the publishing is incredibly foreign to journalists.
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It's all dependent on human context. This is what we're starting to see with del.icio.us, with Flickr, with systems that are allowing for and aggregating tags. The signal benefit of these systems is that they don't recreate the structured, hierarchical categorization so often forced onto us by our physical systems. Instead, we're dealing with a significant break -- by letting users tag URLs and then aggregating those tags, we're going to be able to build alternate organizational systems, systems that, like the Web itself, do a better job of letting individuals create value for one another, often without realizing it.
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28 Sep 07
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06 Sep 07
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27 Aug 07
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24 Aug 07
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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.
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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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The sense of ontology there is something like "an explicit specification of a conceptualization."
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07 Aug 07
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22 Jul 07
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Public Stiky Notes
Page Comments
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 & T
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."
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