<span> This must have been the article that influenced Wesch ...<br /></span>
This link has been bookmarked by 470 people . It was first bookmarked on 02 Mar 2006, by Hugh Bristic.
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12 Jun 19
feabibliotheekClay Shirky's Writings About the Internet (Economics & Culture, Media & Community).
Article: 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 & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification." The written version is a heavily edited concatenation of those two talks. -
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habits of mind that are left over from earlier strategies.
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old systems get broken before people know what's going to take their place
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categorization
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the link
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the tag
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ontology in the philosophical sense is the study of entities and their relations
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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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what is possible
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The sense of ontology there is something like "an explicit specification of a conceptualization.
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essence, "Is-ness."
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categorization and classification
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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. 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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he ontological ideal is a mistake.
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context errors,
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What's being optimized is number of books on the shelf.
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is designed to minimize seek time on shelves
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ired 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
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'go' to where they 'are'.
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Literature -- which is part of Humanities, not Entertainment
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Google understood there is no shelf, and that there is no file system.
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after hearing from the user
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09 Oct 13
Dan Verständig"This piece is based on two talks I gave in the spring of 2005 -- one at the O'Reilly ETech conference in March, entitled "Ontology Is Overrated", and one at the IMCExpo in April entitled "Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification." The written version is a heavily edited concatenation of those two talks."
tagging ontology taxonomy web folksonomy classification tags web2.0
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carlostremblayUn article de fond (plus de 7 000 mots) qui fait la démonstration convaincante que l'étiquetage (tagging) du contenu par les usagers d'Internet a plus de valeur que les classifications formelles faites par les professionnels. Par Clay Shirky.
activité-A 3-étoiles étiquettes tagging folksonomie ontologie Web 2.0
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07 Feb 11
katie kuksenokWhen 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.
tagging folksonomy article technology libraries excellent point queer
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As you can see here, the characteristics of a del.icio.us entry are a link, an optional extended description, and a set of tags, which are words or phrases users attach to a link. Each user who adds a link to the system can give it a set of tags -- some do, some don't. Attached to each link on the home page are the tags, the username of the person who added it, the number of other people who have added that same link, and the time.
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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06 Apr 10
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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. 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
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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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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.
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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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You do it without a goal of explicitly getting to or even closely matching some theoretically perfect view of the world.
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What it's doing instead is a lot simpler: "A lot of users tagging things foobar are also tagging them frobnitz. I'll tell the user foobar and frobnitz are related." It's up to the user to decide whether or not that recommendation is useful -- del.icio.us has no idea what the tags mean. 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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It's all dependent on human context
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06 Jan 10
Martin Fritzskirky ontology vs. folksonomy (guess which wins)
imported_from_delicious_2016 folksonomy web2.0 media web dissertation text imported_from_delicious
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Mike CaneThis piece is based on two talks I gave in the spring of 2005 -- one at the O'Reilly ETech conference in March, entitled "Ontology Is Overrated", and one at the IMCExpo in April entitled "Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification." The written version is a heavily edited concatenation of those two talks.
Today I want to talk about categorization, and I want to convince you that a lot of what we think we know about categorization is wrong. In particular, I want to convince you that many of the ways we're attempting to apply categorization to the electronic world are actually a bad fit, because we've adopted habits of mind that are left over from earlier strategies. -
19 Nov 09
user 100Fascinating must-read for everyone doing IA, information organizing, navigation
folksonomy taxonomy categories information organization shirky ia navigation cardsorting hypertext classification ontology libraries tagging for:c for-a for-p
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an explicit specification of a conceptualization."
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Ontology
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A book which is equally about two things breaks the 'be in one place' requirement, so each book needs to be declared to about one thing more than others, regardless of its actual content
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they thought there was business value in determining the view the user would have to adopt to use the system.
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Berners-Lee
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if you've got enough links, you don't need the hierarchy anymore
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the link structure is more complex than we can read, except in response to a user query
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voodoo categorization, where acting on the model changes the world
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people doing the categorizing believe, even if only unconciously, that naming the world changes it
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the assertion that restricting vocabularies improves signal assumes that that there's no signal in the difference itself, and no value in protecting the user from too many matches
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Well-managed, well-groomed organizational schemes get worse with scale, both because the costs of supporting such schemes at large volumes are prohibitive, and, as I noted earlier, scaling over time is also a serious problem. Tagging, by contrast, gets better with scale. With a multiplicity of points of view the question isn't "Is everyone tagging any given link 'correctly'", but rather "Is anyone tagging it the way I do?
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We move from a binary choice between saying two tags are the same or different to the Venn diagram option of "kind of is/somewhat is/sort of is/overlaps to this degree". That is a really profound change.
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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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Donna BaumbachOntology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags
tagging folksonomy tags web2.0 web del.icio.us. semanticweb delicious_backup
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02 Jun 09
xdiigoBrowse versus search is a radical increase in the trust we put in link infrastructure
ontology tagging folksonomy tags del.icio.us metadata categorization classification •☆☆☆☆☆ deli
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Joachim MichelClay Shirky's writings about the Internet, including Economics and Culture, Media and Community, Open Source
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Anton KulagaСтатья про фолксономию и управление знаниями
ontology folksonomy tagging web2.0 полезно knowledge_management
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27 Nov 08
David RobertsToday 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
semantic ontology tagging folksonomy classification categorization web2.0
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Pierre LévyClay Shirky's writings about the Internet, including Economics and Culture, Media and Community, Open Source
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radical break with previous categorization strategies, rather than an extension of them.
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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 question ontology asks is: What kinds of things exist or can exist in the world, and what manner of relations can those things have to each other? Ontology is less concerned with what is than with what is possible.
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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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It's tempting to think that the classification schemes that libraries have optimized for in the past can be extended in an uncomplicated way into the digital world. This badly underestimates, in my view, the degree to which what libraries have historically been managing is an entirely different problem.
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Thinking that library catalogs exist to organize concepts confuses the container for the thing contained.
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hierarchy is a good way to manage physical objects.
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simply a byproduct of physical constraints.
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In the digital world, there is no physical constraint that's forcing this kind of organization on us any longer.
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Now we have this ontologically managed list of what's out there.
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It is perfectly possible for any number of links to be in any number of places in a hierarchy, or in many hierarchies, or in no hierarchy at all. But Yahoo decided to privilege one way of organizing links over all others, because they wanted to make assertions about what is "real."
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there is no shelf, and that there is no file system. Google can decide what goes with what after hearing from the user, rather than trying to predict in advance what it is you need to know.
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"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 versus search is a radical increase in the trust we put in link infrastructure, and in the degree of power derived from that link structure. Browse says the people making the ontology, the people doing the categorization, have the responsibility to organize the world in advance.
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If you want something that hasn't been categorized in the way you think about it, you're out of luck.
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search and categorization side-by-side, fewer and fewer people were using categorization to find things.
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then ontology is going to be a bad strategy.
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where the people doing the categorizing believe, even if only unconciously, that naming the world changes it. Unfortunately, most of the world is not actually amenable to voodoo categorization.
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In environments where there's no authority and no force that can be applied to the user, it's very difficult to support the voodoo style of organization.
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Merely naming the world creates no actual change, either in the world, or in the minds of potential users who don't understand the system.
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to guess what their users are thinking, and to make predictions about the future.
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the assertion that restricting vocabularies improves signal assumes that that there's no signal in the difference itself, and no value in protecting the user from too many matches.
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You can't collapse these categorizations without some signal loss.
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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,
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Cities are real. They are real, physical facts. Countries are social fictions. It is much easier for a country to disappear than for a city to disappear, so when you're saying that the small thing is contained by the large thing, you're actually mixing radically different kinds of entities.
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actually turned out to be an unstable category
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the URL gives us a way to create a globally unique ID for anything we need to point to
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to create a globally unique identifier for anything.
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anyone can label those pointers, can tag those URLs, in ways that make them more valuable, and all without requiring top-down organization schemes.
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There is no fixed set of categories or officially approved choices. You can use words, acronyms, numbers, whatever makes sense to you, without regard for anyone else's needs, interests, or requirements.
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Tags have the additional effect of grouping related URLs together.
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selected to help the user in later retrieval of those URLs.
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The addition of a few simple labels hardly seems so momentous, but the surprise here, as so often with the Web, is the surprise of simplicity. Tags are important mainly for what they leave out.
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By forgoing formal classification, tags enable a huge amount of user-produced organizational value, at vanishingly small cost.
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with individual motivation, but group value.
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way to make it valuable to individuals to tag their stuff, you'll generate a lot more data about any given object than if you pay a professional to tag it once and only once
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ndividual differences don't have to be homogenized
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Market logic allows many distinct points of view to co-exist, because it allows individuals to preserve their point of view, even in the face of general disagreement.
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compressing things into a restricted number of categories.
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But in a world where enough points of view are likely to provide some commonality,
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the aggregate signal loss falls with scale in tagging systems, while it grows with scale in systems with single points of view.
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"Is everyone tagging any given link 'correctly'", but rather "Is anyone tagging it the way I do?" As long as at least one other person tags something they way you would, you'll find it
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The Web has an editor, it's everybody.
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Merges create partial overlap between tags, rather than defining tags as synonyms. I
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We move from a binary choice between saying two tags are the same or different to the Venn diagram option of "kind of is/somewhat is/sort of is/overlaps to this degree". That is a really profound change.
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Experts don't catalog this way; experts who learn how to catalogue produce much more consistent labeling. Here, it's whatever the user thought would help them remember the link later.
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"This is context-dependent and temporary." Well, so was the category "East Germany."
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It was 5 years between the spread of the link and Google's figuring out how to use whole collections of links to create additional value.
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We're moving away from that sort of absolute declaration, and towards being able to roll up this kind of value by observing how people handle it in practice.
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Does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world?
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e, but you do it without an ontological goal. You do it without a goal of explicitly getting to or even closely matching some theoretically perfect view of the world.
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emantics here are in the users, not in the system. T
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It's up to the user to decide whether or not that recommendation is useful
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The tag overlap is in the system, but the tag semantics are in the users.
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26 Sep 08
James BonTempoToday I want to talk about categorization, and I want to convince you that a lot of what we think we know about categorization is wrong. In particular, I want to convince you that many of the ways we're attempting to apply categorization to the electronic
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ten years ago, a couple of guys out of Stanford launched a service called Yahoo that offered a list of things available on the Web. It
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dave sgonechinaClay Shirky's 2005 talks on ontology condensed. First 2 chapters of Everything is Misc. basically come from here.
libraries openSource internet google searchEngines classification
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sandra rogersWhat 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 s
folksonomy ontology tags del.icio.us social_bookmark 2010_12_16_delicious_import
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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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08 Nov 07
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Marion WaltonClay Shirky's writings about the Internet, including Economics and Culture, Media and Community, Open Source
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12 Jul 07
Public Stiky Notes
Page Comments
http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html
http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fshirky.com%2Fwritings%2Fontology_overrated.html?tab=comment&uname=grahamperrin for corresponding annotations and comments.
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