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Shirky: Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags

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Saved by 175 people (-33 private), first by anonymouse user on 2006-03-02


Public Comment

on 2006-03-06 by ykominami

ontology

on 2006-03-29 by wroush

Clay Shirky argues that "the only group that can categorize everything is everybody."

on 2006-08-02 by jasonfleming73

Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags

on 2006-08-03 by bowbrick

Clay

on 2006-08-04 by mattmcalister

I 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

on 2006-08-25 by fuzzyface

folksonomies,taxonomies,tagging,social bookmarking,ontologies,articles

on 2006-09-14 by audreyh

one of the more skeptical voices out there on semantic web technologies.

on 2007-01-18 by dhcmrlchtdj

Some convincing arguments about why folksonomies may be better than taxonomies and controlled vocabularies

on 2007-02-07 by kurtmathiesen

by Clay Shirky

on 2007-07-06 by alicemercer

wroush on diigo says, "Clay Shirky argues that "the only group that can categorize everything is everybody." which covers it.

Public Sticky notes

 

Highlighted by ontoligent

on 2009-04-05 by ontoligent

 This must have been the article that influenced Wesch ...

"... a lot of what we think we know about categorization is wrong ... [coming up] 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."

Highlighted by memoriatechnica

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. 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. You do it without a goal of explicitly getting to or even closely matching some theoretically perfect view of the world.

Highlighted by xtreme

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.

Highlighted by rlmrdl

It's all dependent on human context. This is what we're starting to see with del.icio.us, with Flickr, with systems that are allowing for and aggregating tags. The signal benefit of these systems is that they don't recreate the structured, hierarchical categorization so often forced onto us by our physical systems. Instead, we're dealing with a significant break -- by letting users tag URLs and then aggregating those tags, we're going to be able to build alternate organizational systems, systems that, like the Web itself, do a better job of letting individuals create value for one another, often without realizing it.

Highlighted by peterjordan

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.

Highlighted by marcok

Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags

Highlighted by tzon02

Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags

Highlighted by tzon02

Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags

Highlighted by tzon02

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.

Highlighted by pierregorissen

What's being optimized is number of books on the shelf. That's what the categorization scheme is categorizing. 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. The musculature of the Library of Congress categorization scheme looks like it's about concepts. It is organized into non-overlapping categories that get more detailed at lower and lower levels -- any concept is supposed to fit in one category and in no other categories. But every now and again, the skeleton pokes through, and the skeleton, the supporting structure around which the system is really built, is designed to minimize seek time on shelves.

Highlighted by size23more

Now imagine a world where everything can have a unique identifier.

Highlighted by kkirwin

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.

Highlighted by ironick

Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags

Highlighted by earlybert

Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags

Highlighted by maartencannaerts

Now imagine a world where everything can have a unique identifier.

Highlighted by kevinsport

Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags

Highlighted by maartencannaerts

Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags

Highlighted by xxcchen

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.

Highlighted by ninmah

radical break with previous categorization strategies, rather than an extension of them.

Highlighted by trumble

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.

Highlighted by trumble

The main thread of ontology in the philosophical sense is the study of entities and their relations.

Highlighted by trumble

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.

Highlighted by trumble

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.

Highlighted by trumble

Thinking that library catalogs exist to organize concepts confuses the container for the thing contained.

Highlighted by trumble

hierarchy is a good way to manage physical objects.

Highlighted by trumble

simply a byproduct of physical constraints.

Highlighted by trumble

In the digital world, there is no physical constraint that's forcing this kind of organization on us any longer.

Highlighted by trumble

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

Highlighted by gideonburton

Now we have this ontologically managed list of what's out there.

Highlighted by trumble

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."

Highlighted by trumble

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

Highlighted by muppet

they thought there was business value in determining the view the user would have to adopt to use the system.

Highlighted by gideonburton

Berners-Lee

Highlighted by gideonburton

if you've got enough links, you don't need the hierarchy anymore

Highlighted by gideonburton

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.

Highlighted by trumble

"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."

Highlighted by trumble

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.

Highlighted by trumble

If you want something that hasn't been categorized in the way you think about it, you're out of luck.

Highlighted by trumble

the link structure is more complex than we can read, except in response to a user query

Highlighted by gideonburton

search and categorization side-by-side, fewer and fewer people were using categorization to find things.

Highlighted by trumble

then ontology is going to be a bad strategy.

Highlighted by trumble

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.

Highlighted by trumble

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.

Highlighted by trumble

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.

Highlighted by trumble

to guess what their users are thinking, and to make predictions about the future.

Highlighted by trumble

voodoo categorization, where acting on the model changes the world

Highlighted by gideonburton

people doing the categorizing believe, even if only unconciously, that naming the world changes it

Highlighted by gideonburton

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.

Highlighted by trumble

because the cataloguers assume their classification should have force on the world, they underestimate the difficulty of understanding what users are thinking,

Highlighted by trumble

You can't collapse these categorizations without some signal loss.

Highlighted by trumble

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

Highlighted by gideonburton

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.

Highlighted by trumble

actually turned out to be an unstable category

Highlighted by trumble

the URL gives us a way to create a globally unique ID for anything we need to point to

Highlighted by trumble

to create a globally unique identifier for anything.

Highlighted by trumble

anyone can label those pointers, can tag those URLs, in ways that make them more valuable, and all without requiring top-down organization schemes.

Highlighted by trumble

selected to help the user in later retrieval of those URLs.

Highlighted by trumble

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.

Highlighted by trumble

Tags have the additional effect of grouping related URLs together.

Highlighted by trumble

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.

Highlighted by trumble

By forgoing formal classification, tags enable a huge amount of user-produced organizational value, at vanishingly small cost.

Highlighted by trumble

with individual motivation, but group value.

Highlighted by trumble

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

Highlighted by trumble

ndividual differences don't have to be homogenized

Highlighted by trumble

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.

Highlighted by trumble

compressing things into a restricted number of categories.

Highlighted by trumble

But in a world where enough points of view are likely to provide some commonality,

Highlighted by trumble

the aggregate signal loss falls with scale in tagging systems, while it grows with scale in systems with single points of view.

Highlighted by trumble

"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

Highlighted by trumble

The Web has an editor, it's everybody.

Highlighted by trumble

Merges create partial overlap between tags, rather than defining tags as synonyms. I

Highlighted by trumble

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.

Highlighted by trumble

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?

Highlighted by gideonburton

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.

Highlighted by gideonburton

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.

Highlighted by trumble

"This is context-dependent and temporary." Well, so was the category "East Germany."

Highlighted by trumble

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.

Highlighted by trumble

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.

Highlighted by trumble

Does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world?

Highlighted by trumble

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.

Highlighted by trumble

emantics here are in the users, not in the system. T

Highlighted by trumble

It's up to the user to decide whether or not that recommendation is useful

Highlighted by trumble

The tag overlap is in the system, but the tag semantics are in the users.

Highlighted by trumble

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.

Highlighted by gideonburton