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

• 30 Nov 09
  

  Jason stewart

  ontology categorization research

• 18 Nov 09
  

  Edoardo Marcora

  tags gmarks

• 06 Nov 09
  

  anmelu

  kan den bruges i m3 opgaven?

  • 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...
  • • 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
• 05 Oct 09
  

  Martin Nguyen
  • Web is actually a radical break with previous categorization strategies, rather than an extension of them
  • The sense of ontology there is something like "an explicit specification of a conceptualization."
  • 38 more annotations...
  • • The periodic table of the elements is my vote for "Best. Classification. Evar."
    • What's being optimized is number of books on the shelf. That's what the categorization scheme is categorizing.
    • he system is really built, is designed to minimize seek time on shelves.
    • a book can be about several things at once.
    • a book has to be declared to be about some main thing
    • Yahoo, faced with the possibility that they could organize things with no physical constraints, added the shelf back.
    • a priori organization
    • 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.
    • When Does Ontological Classification Work Well?

    • Domain to be Organized
      

      • Small corpus
        
      • Formal categories
        
      • Stable entities
        
      • Restricted entities
        
      • Clear edges
    • The more of those characteristics that are true, the
      better a fit ontology is likely to be.

    • Participants
      

      • Expert catalogers
        
      • Authoritative source of judgment
        
      • Coordinated users
        
      • Expert users
    • 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.

    • "Here are some characteristics where ontological classification doesn't work well":
      

      
      Domain
      

      • Large corpus
        
      • No formal categories
        
      • Unstable entities
        
      • Unrestricted entities
        
      • No clear edges
        
      • Uncoordinated users
        
      • Amateur users
        
      • Naive catalogers
        
      • No Authority
    • 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
    • eople doing the categorizing believe, even if only unconciously, that naming the world changes it.
    • 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.
    • thesaurus
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • magine a world where everything can have a unique identifier.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • individual differences don't have to be homogenized.
    • The signal loss in traditional categorization schemes comes from compressing things into a restricted number of categories
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • The Web has an editor, it's everybody.
    • 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
    • We are moving away from binary categorization -- books either are or are not entertainment -- and into this probabilistic world,
    • the semantics here are in the users, not in the system
• 08 Sep 09
  

  bik3much ?

  ontology tagging folksonomy tags classification categorization social-bookmarking

• 05 Sep 09
  

  Steve Brantley

  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.

  ontology tagging folksonomy classification categorization web tags

  • 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.
  • 1 more annotations...

  • • 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.
      

• 25 Aug 09
  

  Stephen Shimshock

  ontology tagging folksonomy categorization web2.0

• 23 Aug 09
  

  lehrblogger

  thesis socialsoftware articles tagging ontology folksonomy

• 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."/

  technology media

• 17 Aug 09
  

  biblio upr

  Classification and Creating sense of the World, or Our Brains are not Linear

  taxonomies yahoo hierarchical classification tagging web2.0challenge

• 01 Aug 09
  

  seth springer

  tagging classification categorization imported

• 26 Jun 09
  

  David Adamson

  IT Research

• 18 Jun 09
  

  Alexander Steinhoff

  tagging categorization classification tags folksonomy ontology article toread

• 17 Jun 09
  

  Sébastien Bocq

  ontology tags categorization folksonomy

• 

  Ernesto Krsulovic

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

• 03 Jun 09
  

  Travis Harshaw

  Information Revolution

• 21 May 09
  

  Ruslan Madzhitov

  gui

• 18 May 09
  

  Arne van Elk

  Clay 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

  • 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.
• 

  Hans Wobbe

  tagging tags classification categorization ontology sred09

  • Clay Shirky's Writings About the Internet

    • 

      Hans Wobbe on 2009-05-18

      ...
• 01 May 09
  

  Tim Jacob

  metadata classification toread meeting

• 28 Apr 09
  

  neilp9
  • 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?
  • 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...
  • • The periodic table of the elements is my vote for "Best. Classification. Evar."
    • If it's impossible to create a completely coherent categorization
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.

    • Domain to be Organized
      

      • Small corpus
        
      • Formal categories
        
      • Stable entities
        
      • Restricted entities
        
      • Clear edges
        

    • You can also turn that list around. You can say "Here are some characteristics where ontological classification doesn't work well":
      

      
      Domain
      

      • Large corpus
        
      • No formal categories
        
      • Unstable entities
        
      • Unrestricted entities
        
      • No clear edges
        
      • Uncoordinated users
        
      • Amateur users
        
      • Naive catalogers
        
      • No Authority
        
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • "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.
    • 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.
    • 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
    • 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.
      

• 24 Apr 09
  

  Karen Botkin

  library

• 31 Mar 09
  

  Wade Ren

  tagging

• 15 Mar 09
  

  Sue Maberry

  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 strategie

  librarianship tagging classification web2.0

• 04 Mar 09
  

  ouyang jun

  ontology tagging folksonomy tags classification categorization

  • Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags
• 26 Feb 09
  

  Chuck Brands
• 24 Feb 09
  

  Hass Murphy

  information about the tags and ontology

  tags ontology resource reference

• 17 Feb 09
  

  Sacha Arozarena

  "The only group that can categorize everything is everybody"

  semanticweb tagging web3.0 ontology km

• 13 Feb 09
  

  Guilherme Menezes

  folksonomy ontology

• 10 Feb 09
  

  Gordon Haff

  Interesting piece. I always struggle with figuring out how to best keep some vague veneer of order on my digital stuff.

  SemanticWeb metadata

• 

  Tom George
  • 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.
• 

  Dennis Witmer
• 

  Chris Lott
• 09 Feb 09
  

  mary delong
  • Ontology
  • free-form labeling,
  • 11 more annotations...
  • • What is Ontology?
    • periodic table of the elements
    • What's being optimized is number of books on the shelf
    • The essence of a book is "book."
    • Berners-Lee
    • Google understood there is no shelf
    • have the responsibility to organize the world in advance.
    • classification scheme that works
    • naming the world changes it
    • "We are Yahoo We do not have biases. This is just how the world is. The world is organized into a dozen categories.
    • 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.
• 04 Feb 09
  

  E R

  Shirky 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

• 19 Jan 09
  

  Dan O'Brien Muzyka

  socialsoftware folksonomy tagging tags taxonomy

• 08 Jan 09
  

  guilana sonia

  article media

• 22 Dec 08
  

  Graham Perrin

  ontology categorisation link tag unread 2009

  • Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags
  • This piece is based on two talks
  • 5 more annotations...
  • • spring of 2005
    • a heavily edited concatenation
    • 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."
• 20 Dec 08
  

  a r

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

• 11 Dec 08
  

  Stan Johann

  ontology tagging folksonomy tags classification categorization web web2.0

• 07 Dec 08
  

  Vic Jenkins

  T&L1 msc

• 25 Nov 08
  

  Ian Clark

  folksonomy informationretrieval internet metadata tagging web2.0

• 24 Nov 08
  

  Scott McCord

  In denfense of folksonomy

  web2.0 library taxonomy tagging social

• 06 Nov 08
  

  WG

  web2.0 tags taxonomy

• 28 Oct 08
  

  Jason K

  701

• 26 Oct 08
  

  Rafael Alvarado

  semantic-web

• 22 Oct 08
  

  Mohit Gupta

  ontology tagging research web information folksonomy semanticweb 202

  • organic ways of organizing information
  • organic ways of organizing information
  • 14 more annotations...
  • • organic ways of organizing information
    • organic ways of organizing information
    • 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."
    • What's being optimized is number of books on the shelf. That's what the categorization scheme is categorizing.
    • organized into non-overlapping categories
    • any concept is supposed to fit in one category and in no other categories
    • When Does Ontological Classification Work Well? #

    • Domain to be Organized
      

      • Small corpus
        
      • Formal categories
        
      • Stable entities
        
      • Restricted entities
        
      • Clear edges
        

    • Participants
      

      • Expert catalogers
        
      • Authoritative source of judgment
        
      • Coordinated users
        
      • Expert users
        
    • some characteristics where ontological classification doesn't work well":

    • Domain
      

      • Large corpus
        
      • No formal categories
        
      • Unstable entities
        
      • Unrestricted entities
        
      • No clear edges
        
      • Uncoordinated users
        
      • Amateur users
        
      • Naive catalogers
        
      • No Authority
        
    • categorizers to take on two jobs that have historically been quite hard: mind reading, and fortune telling.
    • You can't collapse these categorizations
      without some signal loss.
• 19 Oct 08
  

  George Appel

  folksonomy tagging search_engines taxonomy

• 17 Oct 08
  

  artje sneng

  1

• 04 Aug 08
  

  roland legrand

  web2.0 web tagging social semanticweb search reference internet taxonomy tags

• 25 Jul 08
  

  Rick L

  there is no shelf

  taxonomy ontology categorization

  • the obvious truth: there is no shelf
• 17 Jul 08
  

  Ejner Jensen

  ontology Tagging

• 27 Jun 08
  

  Carla Arena

  ontology tagging folksonomy classification tags categorization web web2.0 by_PaulBeaufait

  • 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...
  • • It's all dependent on human context
    • 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.
• 

  Paul Beaufait

  reference from Folksonomies: Tidying up Tags?

  ontology tagging folksonomies classification tags categorization

• 17 Jun 08
  

  Fernando S

  ontology folksonomy classification tags categorization web2.0 tagging web links

• 14 Jun 08
  

  Garry Jenkin

  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

  tags tagging del.icio.us tag

• 02 Jun 08
  

  Saul il

  Categories, Links, and Tags

  tag classification categorization ontology web

• 22 May 08
  

  Jay Knight

  ontology vocabulary index

  • Well-managed, well-groomed organizational schemes get worse with scale
• 04 May 08
  

  Morris Pelzel

  tech

• 03 May 08
  

  takayuki kawamoto
• 14 Apr 08
  

  Mr. DiGi

  Zamyšlení nad zjednodušováním informací (tagů) při reálném použití

  web

• 

  Paolo Gallizio

  lst2.0 informazione

• 03 Apr 08
  

  Michael Dila

  categorization web2.0 ontology tagging folksonomy classification tags shirky

• 30 Mar 08
  

  max oliver

  categorization classification folks folksonomy ontology tagging web

• 

  Jean Thorpe

  tagging

• 20 Mar 08
  

  katarina peovic

  of entities and their

  philosophy

• 27 Feb 08
  

  Alex Fink

  imported Theory ontology

• 23 Feb 08
  

  Brent Terrazas

  imported randombookmarks ontology

• 21 Jan 08
  

  David Healy

  sacisg taxonomy

• 17 Jan 08
  

  Martin M

  ontology tagging

• 15 Jan 08
  

  chellery stick

  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 i

  mstweb metadata

• 27 Dec 07
  

  Sally Trexler

  analysis folksonomies tagging web2.0

• 20 Dec 07
  

  Keith Fortowsky

  An 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

  • 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.
• 06 Dec 07
  

  Chris Lasher

  An 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

• 30 Nov 07
  

  ento entotto

  del.icio.us km ontology tag tm

• 26 Nov 07
  

  sallygla

  cataloging classification folkonomies tagging

  • user-developed classification
  • tagging -- free-form labeling,
  • 4 more annotations...

  • • 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.
    • frailty of human memory
    • 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.
• 22 Nov 07
  

  Eli Pav

  article folksonomy web2.0 ontology

• 

  Maggie Verster

  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

  tagging folksonomy

• 

  Stefan Søndervang

  folksonomy tagging

• 

  Andrew Perry

  essay tagging web2.0 ontology web

• 19 Nov 07
  

  Owen Mathews

  article internet metadata

• 18 Nov 07
  

  julianjonker

  categories classification clay-shirky ontology tags

• 08 Nov 07
  

  Kelly Anderson

  Listed in References from Collaborative Tagging article by Golder and Huberman

  blogs tagging folksonomy tags del.icio.us

• 04 Nov 07
  

  advee77

  category folksonomy internet

• 29 Oct 07
  

  Richard Smyth

  information_literacy informationliteracy ontology tagging tags EDCO folksonomy classification web2.0

• 28 Oct 07
  

  davide g.

  epistemologia

  • Lacking the right measurements, they assumed that gaseousness was an essential aspect -- literally, part of the essence -- of those elements.
  • What's being optimized is number of books on the shelf. That's what the categorization scheme is categorizing.
  • 22 more annotations...
  • • 

      • 

        davide g. on 2007-10-28

        the key point is non overlapping
      • 

        sallygla on 2007-11-26

        Very true. A strength and goal of LCSH
    • It is organized into non-overlapping categories that get more detailed at lower and lower levels
    • The categorization scheme is a response to physical constraints on storage
    • 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
    • at the moment that you are looking for it, we will do our best to service it based on this link structure
    • 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.
    • Now imagine a world where everything can have a unique identifier
    • Tags are important mainly for what they leave out
    • "Each individual categorization scheme is worth less than a professional categorization scheme. But there are many, many more of them."
    • robustness and cost of creation
    • 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.
    • The solution to this sort of signal loss is growth
    • question isn't "Is everyone tagging any given link 'correctly'", but rather "Is anyone tagging it the way I do?
    • 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.

      • 

        davide g. on 2007-10-28

        IMPORTANT. see rizoma
    • 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
    • Organization Goes Organic
    • without a goal
    • the semantics here are in the users, not in the system
    • 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.
• 

  horsecloud

  classfication ontology

• 27 Oct 07
  

  Amy VanDonsel
• 24 Oct 07
  

  Michael C. Harris

  ontology structure categorisation metadata web tags tagging

  • The tag overlap is in the system, but the tag semantics are in the users.
• 15 Oct 07
  

  Barbara Lindsey

  ontology tagging web2.0 categorization shirky

  • 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 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.
  • 1 more annotations...
  • • 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.
• 28 Sep 07
  

  Kai Lautaportti

  webdevelopment ontology

• 06 Sep 07
  

  Fabiano Caruso

  del.icio.us folksonomy ontology tagging

• 27 Aug 07
  

  Trisha Gao

  classifications ontology research tagging

• 24 Aug 07
  

  Jeremy Price

  epistemology folksonomy information ontology organization tagging technology web2.0

  • 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.
  • The main thread of ontology in the philosophical sense is the study of entities and their relations.
  • 1 more annotations...
  • • The sense of ontology there is something like "an explicit specification of a conceptualization."
• 07 Aug 07
  

  Mario A Núñez

  tags

• 

  Mario a núñez

  tags

• 22 Jul 07
  

  docrpm

  ontology tag clouds tags taxonomy

• 15 Jul 07
  

  Will Napier

  Philosophy Tech

• 14 Jul 07
  

  jeri hurd

  technology semantic web folksonomy

• 09 Jul 07
  

  tronec

  2.0 organize web

Public Stiky Notes

• 
  Hans Wobbe on 2009-05-18
  ...
• 
  sallygla on 2007-11-26
  Very true. A strength and goal of LCSH
• 
  davide g. on 2007-10-28
  the key point is non overlapping
• 
  davide g. on 2007-10-28
  IMPORTANT. see rizoma

Page Comments

• 
  Josh gentry on 2005-12-22
  Good stuff.
• 
  Dave Morehouse on 2006-07-27
  Clay Shirky's enlightening distillation of how tagging fundamentally differs from catgorization, and offers new organizational paradigms based on user-centric ontologies. Yeah, something like that.
• 
  Jason Fleming on 2006-08-02
  The rise of user-developed classification.
• 
  tomotaka nagata on 2006-08-10
  面白そう。ただし英語。だから、面白“そう”。なんとかせねばと思いつつ。
• 
  Rob Jongschaap on 2006-10-25
  Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags
  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
• 
  Pistos Christou on 2006-11-03
  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." Th
• 
  Mike Hetherington on 2006-11-14
  file systems - Google vs. Yahoo
• 
  Shannon Holman on 2006-12-03
  seminal essay by Clay Shirky
• 
  Jeremy Price on 2007-09-04
  This piece is based on two talks Clay 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."
• 
  davide g. on 2007-10-28
  excellent discussion!!
• 
  Graham Perrin on 2009-07-29
  I should read this alongside Organizing projects and contexts in Chandler.
• 
  Graham Perrin on 2009-07-30
  Referred from Chandler Wiki : How The Cookie Crumbles Part I | Diigo
• 
  anmelu on 2009-11-06
  go pointe - der er ingen reol cyperspace

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