

Ontology is Overrated – Categories, Links, and Tags (2005) - Tomte
http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html

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lmm
My favourite counterexample is mp3 vs ogg "tags". Mp3 has a fairly complete
"traditional" tag schema, with things like "album artist" and "composer". Ogg
allows completely free key-value pairs as tags - with the result that it's
completely useless. A few very basic tags like "artist" and "title" get
applied by common consensus, but forget about finding "composer" or "genre" in
your ogg tags, because none of the players can agree on what the tag should
be.

