This link has been bookmarked by 755 people and liked by 1 people. It was first bookmarked on 02 Mar 2006, by Josh gentry.
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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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he link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links.
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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. That strategy of designing categories to cover possible cases in advance is what I'm primarily concerned with, because it is both widely used and badly overrated in terms of its value in the digital world.
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Even using theoretical perfection as a measure of practical success leads to misapplication of resources.
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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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Thinking that library catalogs exist to organize concepts confuses the container for the thing contained.
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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 contents.
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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.
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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.
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The cataloguers first reaction to that is, "Oh my god, that means you won't be introducing the movies people to the cinema people!" To which the obvious answer is "Good. 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.
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The Only Group That Can Categorize Everything Is Everybody
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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.
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As Schachter says of del.icio.us, "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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Users don't get to participate those kind of discussions around traditional categorization schemes, but with tagging, anyone is free to use the words he or she thinks are appropriate, without having to agree with anyone else about how something "should" be tagged. 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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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 -- 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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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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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".
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You can see there's a tag "to_read". A professional cataloguer would look at this tag in horror -- "This is context-dependent and temporary." Well, so was the category "East Germany." Once you expand your time scale to include the actual life of the categorization scheme itself, you recognize that the distinction between temporary and permanent is awfully vague.
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19 Jul 16
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The idea of a perfect scheme is simply a Platonic ideal. However, I want to argue that even the ontological ideal is a mistake. Even using theoretical perfection as a measure of practical success leads to misapplication of resources.
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The categorization scheme is a response to physical constraints on storage, and to people's inability to keep the location of more than a few hundred things in their mind at once. Once you own more than a few hundred books, you have to organize them somehow. (My mother, who was a reference librarian, said she wanted to reshelve the entire University library by color, because students would come in and say "I'm looking for a sociology book. It's green...") But however you do it, the frailty of human memory and the physical fact of books make some sort of organizational scheme a requirement, and hierarchy is a good way to manage physical objects.
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t was the first really significant attempt to bring order to the Web. As the Web expanded, the Yahoo list grew into a hierarchy with categories.
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There's a top level, and subdirectories roll up under that. Subdirectories contain files or further subdirectories and so on, all the way down. Both librarians and computer scientists hit the same next idea, which is "You know, it wouldn't hurt to add a few secondary links in here" -- symbolic links, aliases, shortcuts, whatever you want to call them.
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They said, "Get out of here with that crazy talk. A URL can only appear in three places. That's the Yahoo rule."
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encode that in advance."
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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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- Large corpus
- No formal categories
- Unstable entities
- Unrestricted entities
- No clear edges
Domain
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23 Nov 15
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14 Oct 15
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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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Here's the first top-level category in the Soviet library system:
A: Marxism-Leninism A1: Classic works of Marxism-Leninism A3: Life and work of C.Marx, F.Engels, V.I.Lenin A5: Marxism-Leninism Philosophy A6: Marxist-Leninist Political Economics A7/8: Scientific Communism
Some of those categories are starting to look a little bit dated.
Or, my favorite -- 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?
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So what's being optimized here? It's not geography. It's not population. It's not regional GDP.
What's being optimized is number of books on the shelf.
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My mother, who was a reference librarian, said she wanted to reshelve the entire University library by color, because students would come in and say "I'm looking for a sociology book. It's green..."
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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.
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."
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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.
The cataloguers first reaction to that is, "Oh my god, that means you won't be introducing the movies people to the cinema people!" To which the obvious answer is "Good. 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.
When we get to really contested terms like queer/gay/homosexual, by this point, all the signal loss is in the collapse, not in the expansion. "Oh, the people talking about 'queer politics' and the people talking about 'the homosexual agenda', they're really talking about the same thing." Oh no they're not. If you think the movies and cinema people were going to have a fight, wait til you get the queer politics and homosexual agenda people in the same room.
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You can see there's a tag "to_read". A professional cataloguer would look at this tag in horror -- "This is context-dependent and temporary." Well, so was the category "East Germany." Once you expand your time scale to include the actual life of the categorization scheme itself, you recognize that the distinction between temporary and permanent is awfully vague. There isn't in fact a binary condition of a tag that can or cannot survive any kind of long-term examination.
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13 Jun 15
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06 Dec 14
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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.
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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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When people were offered search and categorization side-by-side, fewer and fewer people were using categorization to find things.
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Tags are simply labels for URLs, selected to help the user in later retrieval of those URLs. Tags have the additional effect of grouping related URLs together. 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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This is not a way to inject linguistic meaning into the machine.
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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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Wessel van RensburgShirky: Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags (oldie but goodie. also for the knowledge map folks) http://t.co/2afgGBdqyN
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But the idea that the filtering is after the publishing is incredibly foreign to journalists.
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03 Jul 14
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A lot of the conversation that's going on now about categorization starts at a second step -- "Since categorization is a good way to organize the world, we should..." But the first step is to ask the critical question: Is categorization a good idea?
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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.
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The problem is, because the cataloguers assume their classification should have force on the world, they underestimate the difficulty of understanding what users are thinking, and they overestimate the amount to which users will agree, either with one another or with the catalogers, about the best way to categorize. They also underestimate the loss from erasing difference of expression, and they overestimate loss from the lack of a thesaurus.
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The Only Group That Can Categorize Everything Is Everybody
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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. 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.
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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.
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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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using a thesaurus to force everyone's tags into tighter synchrony would actually worsen the noise you'll get with your signal.
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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.
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Does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world?
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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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12 Jun 14
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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.
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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.
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Yahoo is saying "We understand better than you how the world is organized, because we are trained professionals
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Look what's happened here. Yahoo, faced with the possibility that they could organize things with no physical constraints, added the shelf back.
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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
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This looks relatively simple with the Apple/Mac/OSX example, but when we start to expand to other groups of related words, like movies, film, and cinema, the case for the thesaurus becomes much less clear
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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
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If you think the movies and cinema people were going to have a fight, wait til you get the queer politics and homosexual agenda people in the same room.
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Mac McBurneyToday I want to talk about categorization, and I want<br />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.
ontology folksonomy classification tags categorization web taxonomy Shirky
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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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The essence of a book isn't the ideas it contains. The essence of a book is "book." Thinking that library catalogs exist to organize concepts confuses the container for the thing contained
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a book can be about several things at once. It is the book itself, the physical fact of the bound object, that has to be one place, and if it's one place, it can't also be in another place. And this in turn means that a book has to be declared to be about some main thing. 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 contents
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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
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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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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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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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When people were offered search and categorization side-by-side, fewer and fewer people were using categorization to find things
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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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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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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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lissa warshawThe strategy of tagging -- free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints -- seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us,
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you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets. -
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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 say "Here are some characteristics where ontological classification doesn't work well":
Domain
Participants
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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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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
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I want to convince you that a lot of what we think we know about categorization is wrong
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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.
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"ontology", which has to do with making clear and explicit statements about entities in a particular domain, has so many conflicting definitions. I'll offer two general ones.
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28 Oct 11
mikael böök"The Only Group That Can Categorize Everything Is Everybody ", Clay Shirky writes. Why group? Anybody can do it.
What is the difference between anybody and everybody?-
Google understood there is no shelf, and that there is no file system
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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.
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we believe we can build a world where we don't need the hierarchy to coexist with the link structure.
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'people infrastructure'
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because the cataloguers assume their classification should have force on the world, they underestimate the difficulty of understanding what users are thinking, and they overestimate the amount to which users will agree
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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.
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Kevin CarmodyLove the bit on Dewey Decimal categories of religion.
ontology tagging folksonomy semanticweb classification categorisation
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02 Sep 11
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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.
The essence of a book isn't the ideas it contains. The essence of a book is "book." Thinking that library catalogs exist to organize concepts confuses the container for the thing contained.
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The "Balkans/Asia" kind of imbalance is simply a byproduct of physical constraints. It isn't the ideas in a book that have to be in one place -- a book can be about several things at once. It is the book itself, the physical fact of the bound object, that has to be one place, and if it's one place, it can't also be in another place. And this in turn means that a book has to be declared to be about some main thing. 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 contents.
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.
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There Is No Shelf"
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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.
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."
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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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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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But the first step is to ask the critical question: Is categorization a good idea?
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26 Jul 11
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The reason we know SUVs are a light truck instead of a car is that the Government says they're a light truck
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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
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It is much easier for a country to disappear than for a city to disappear
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19 Jun 11
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The periodic table of the elements is my vote for "Best. Classification. Evar." It turns out that by organizing elements by the number of protons in the nucleus, you get all of this fantastic value, both descriptive and predictive value. And because what you're doing is organizing things, the periodic table is as close to making assertions about essence as it is physically possible to get. This is a really powerful scheme, almost perfect. Almost.
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If it's impossible to create a completely coherent categorization, even when you're doing something as physically related to essence as chemistry, imagine the problems faced by anyone who's dealing with a domain where essence is even less obvious.
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The categorization scheme is a response to physical constraints on storage,
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there is no shelf.
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The links alone are enough.
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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.
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, 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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When people were offered search and categorization side-by-side, fewer and fewer people were using categorization to find things.
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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
Participants
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ontology is going to be a bad strategy.
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The Only Group That Can Categorize Everything Is Everybody #
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is the surprise of simplicity.
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with individual motivation, but group value.
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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.
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the aggregate signal loss falls with scale in tagging systems,
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del.icio.us has no idea what the tags mean.
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02 Jun 11
William Gunnre: category rot, always worth reading @cshirky on ontology. don't always agree with him, but worth reading. http://bit.ly/IMJ7S #lodlam
– wilbanks (wilbanks) http://twitter.com/wilbanks/status/76329598236889088 -
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Lene Karin WibergOm du vil forstå hva folksonomy er til forskjell fra hierarki og katalog, kan du lese her http://bit.ly/IMJ7S
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Dazinism DazinismI 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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Mercury Chaos...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 wo
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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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It is a rich irony that the word "ontology", which has to do with making clear and explicit statements about entities in a particular domain, has so many conflicting definitions.
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The main thread of ontology in the philosophical sense is the study of entities and their relations. 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 possib
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The common thread between the two definitions is essence, "Is-ness." In a particular domain, what kinds of things can we say exist in that domain, and how can we say those things relate to each other?
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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.
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That strategy of designing categories to cover possible cases in advance is what I'm primarily concerned with, because it is both widely used and badly overrated in terms of its value in the digital world.
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The periodic table of the elements is my vote for "Best. Classification. Evar."
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almost perfect. Almost.
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Or, my favorite -- 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?
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The essence of a book isn't the ideas it contains. The essence of a book is "book." Thinking that library catalogs exist to organize concepts confuses the container for the thing contained.
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a book can be about several things at once. It is the book itself, the physical fact of the bound object, that has to be one place
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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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We can do without it, and you'd think we'd have learned that lesson by now.
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Yahoo is saying "We understand better than you how the world is organized, because we are trained professionals.
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When you go to Literature -- which is part of Humanities, not Entertainment -- you are told, similarly, that booksellers are not 'really' there. Because they are a commercial service, booksellers are 'really' in Business.
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Then, in the early 90s, one of the things that Berners-Lee showed us is that you could have a lot of links. You don't have to have just a few links, you could have a whole lot of links.
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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.
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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.
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Is categorization a good idea? We can see, from the Yahoo versus Google example, that there are a number of cases where you get significant value out of not categorizing. Even Google adopted DMOZ, the open source version of the Yahoo directory, and later they downgraded its presence on the site, because almost no one was using it. When people were offered search and categorization side-by-side, fewer and fewer people were using categorization to find things.
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- 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
Participants
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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.
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The Web, by contrast, was and is a complete mess, with only one brand of pointer, the URL, and no mechanism for global organization or resources. The Web is mainly notable for two things -- the way it ignored most of the theories of hypertext and rich metadata, and how much better it works than any of the proposed alternatives.
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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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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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If, on the other hand, you believe that we make sense of the world, if we are, from a bunch of different points of view, applying some kind of sense to the world, then you don't privilege one top level of sense-making over the other. What you do instead is you try to find ways that the individual sense-making can roll up to something which is of value in aggregate, but you do it without an ontological goal.
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11 Oct 10
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06 Sep 10
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19 Aug 10
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12 Aug 10
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05 Aug 10
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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