[NEC] #4.1: Ontology is Overrated

[nec at shirky.com]

NEC @ Shirky.com, a mailing list about Networks, Economics, and Culture 

           Published periodically / #4.1 / May 16, 2005
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In this issue:

 - Introduction
 - Essay: Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags
     At http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html

* Introduction =======================================================

You had probably forgotten this list existed. I can only plead what I
hope is a unique set of circumstances including, inter alia,
parenthood, client work, and an unusually demanding semester of
teaching, all of which kept me from writing.

Or, rather, kept me from re-reading. I've always known that there's a
difference between what I post here and what I post on Many-to-Many
[http://corante.com/many/] or Tagsonomy [http://www.tagsonomy.com/]
weblogs (a group weblog on tagging and folksonomy), but never knew
what the difference was. Now I know. The stuff I post here is not just
something I've written, but something I've read and re-read a dozen
times. It's an argument I think will be useful beyond a 72 hour time
horizon. And the re-reading time is what went missing this spring.

There's value in each way of working -- writing quick vs. writing slow
-- and this list is for the slow writing.

This post is different in another way -- because it's taken from two
slide-heavy talks I gave this spring on categorization and tagging,
the only way to send it in email would be HTML email, and if I were
going to do that, I could just give you the link. Which is what I'm
going to do.

I include the intro below, so you can see what the piece is about, but
the full text and pictures are on the Web.

And thanks, as always, for reading.

-clay

* Essay =============================================================

Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags
  http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html

Intro: 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.

More at http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html

* End  ====================================================================

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2005, Clay Shirky