

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

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dood
A criticism of Shirky's essay, which IIRC was fair:
<http://www.peterme.com/archives/000558.html>

I'm fascinated with tagging, ontology and organizing information, and consider
current methods badly flawed; so much so that I tried to make a startup out of
my ideas (turned out to be too complex/ambitious).

My conclusion was that improving on existing systems is possible, but will
require an awful lot of effort. The way forward, IMHO, is a kind of
probabalistic ontology, based on mining lots of data combined with careful use
of human intelligence.

Unfortunately that's as far as I got with the idea, though I hope someone else
can make more progress than I did. Improving the ability to organize
information seems to me to be a crucial problem that gets far too little
attention, probably because it is a very hard problem. I will be surprised and
disappointed if the best we can do 10 years from now is just search,
categorisation and tagging.

~~~
dasil003
The criticism is indeed fair, but I don't think it really sinks Shirky's key
arguments. Shirky may have shortchanged professional ontologies and glossed
over some details, but at the end of the day professional onotologies are
expensive to create and maintain. With the explosion of content on the web,
there's clearly a huge gap between free-text search and professional
categorization.

The interesting part of the article for me (4 years later) is that it points
to the promise of data mining tags, which we've only just begun to scratch the
surface of.

~~~
silentbicycle
I think that there's merit to his criticism of purely hierarchial
classification, he just completely fails to acknowledge that to cataloging
professionals _this is old news_.

(The "gee whiz, tags solve everything" hype has been sufficiently deflated
elsewhere, IMHO.)

~~~
dasil003
That's true, he does aim some low blows there.

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gruseom
The thing that strikes me the most is how dated this is already. Tagging --
the novel concept it introduces at great length -- won, and all the motivating
arguments for it just seem obvious now.

Obviously, that's not a criticism of the piece itself, which is very good.
It's just so (... quickly look up date ...) 2005.

~~~
silentbicycle
I agree, but I think it has interesting parallels to problems that crop up in
sufficiently complicated OO class hierarchy designs, and I'm not sure that
discussion surrounding "design patterns" has fully acknowledged such issues.

People in some other niches (librarians, for one) have spent a lot of time
thinking about these problems. They're generally struggling with managing a
different kind of complexity than programmers are, but I'd love to see more
cross-pollination of ideas.

I'm just trying to generate discussion.

~~~
gruseom
That's true, a lot of the fundamental problems are the same. I suppose OO
design patterns are workarounds for some of them.

Some time ago I read a collection of articles by Michael Jackson (the
computing one) and it turns out he was making similar arguments against this
kind of ontology in the 70s.

Incidentally, I always thought "ontology" meant "philosophy of being", not
cataloguing systems.

------
alabut
Classic article by Shirky - I still see data-centric programmers making this
fundamental underlying mistake all the time.

~~~
silentbicycle
Definitely! I found the article doubly interesting because 1) I worked in a
library through college* and remember finding such skews in organization
rather odd, and 2) while he doesn't have any programming-specific examples, it
also shows why trying to fit everything into a hierarchy of classes tends to
involve a lot of awkward workarounds in any sufficiently complicated (i.e.,
real) system.

I don't have a CS degree (history, actually), but I wonder if, when cliche
examples such as e.g. Animal -> Mammal -> Dog/Cat/etc. was presented ("See!
You can fit things into a tree. OO simulates the real world!"), somebody had
the foresight to ask how things like monotremes are represented. (Hopefully
without being smug about it - it's an important question, far too important to
just be a chance for _That Guy_ to be a smart-ass.)

Library and information science professionals (e.g. catalogers) understand the
enormity of the issue better than most programmers, in my experience. There's
a lot of room for cross-pollination of ideas there.

* Which was a _great_ combination, btw.

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larryfreeman
My company's site, HubPages.Com just pushed out categories this week (April 2,
2009)

This essay has led a lot of people to think that categories are no longer
useful.

This is a highly engaging article which I believe has been too successful in
its attack on categories.

If you are interested why we are very excited about adding categories in
addition to tags, you can check out my blog post here:
[http://blog.hubpages.com/2009/04/categories-add-value-a-
resp...](http://blog.hubpages.com/2009/04/categories-add-value-a-response-to-
clay-shirkys-classic-essay/)

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giles_bowkett
thank you! to get posting rights on Y Combinator, you should have to answer a
quiz, and there should be questions about this Shirky post on it. this and the
one about micropayments. I can't believe some idiot got on the Daily Show and
the front cover of Time without reading Shirky.

