Tags != folksonomies && Tags != Flat name spaces. Many-to-Many:

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Saved by 7 people (-1 private), first by anonymouse user on 2007-02-11

Intelligentinfo on 2008-11-19 - Tags folksonomien , ontologien , semantic_web
Africangirl on 2008-11-19 - Tags folksonomien , ontologien , semantic_web , delicious
Beefer on 2008-11-19 - Tags folksonomies , folksonomy , ontology , article
Cdetrio on 2008-03-22 - Tags bookmarking , philosophy
Project-tnn on 2007-02-11 - Tags folksonomy , imported:del.icio.us , tagging

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And the reason ontology has been even a moderately good idea for the last few hundred years is that the physical fact of books forces you to predict the future. You have to put a book somewhere when you get it, and as you get more books, you can neither reshelve constantly, nor buy enough copies of any given book to file it on all dimensions you might want to search for it on later.

Ontology is a good way to organize objects, in other words, but it is a terrible way to organize ideas, and in the period between the invention of the printing press and the invention of the symlink, we were forced to optimize for the storage and retrieval of objects, not ideas. Now, though, we can scrap of the stupid hack of modeling our worldview on the dictates of shelf space. One day the concept of creativity can be a subset of a larger category, and the next day it can become a slice that cuts across several categories. In hierarchy land, this is a crisis; in tag land, it’s an operation so simple it hardly merits comment.

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The move here is from graph theory (arrange everything in a tree graph, so that graph traversal becomes the organizing principle) to set theory (sets have members, and the overlap or non-overlap of those memberships becomes the organizing principle.) This is analogous to the change in how we handle digital data. The file system started out as a tree graph. Then we added symlinks (aliases, shortcuts), which said “You can organize things differently than you store them, and you can provide more than one mode of access.”