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

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Saved by 103 people (27 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

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 apalme2003

Tags are simply labels for URLs, selected to help the user in later retrieval of those URLs. Tags have the additional effect of grouping related URLs together

Highlighted by apalme2003

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

Highlighted by apalme2003

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.

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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.

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hierarchy is a good way to manage physical objects.

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simply a byproduct of physical constraints.

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

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

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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

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

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.

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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

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

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

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

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actually turned out to be an unstable category

Highlighted by trumble

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

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.

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

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Tags have the additional effect of grouping related URLs together.

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

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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

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.

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with individual motivation, but group value.

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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

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ndividual differences don't have to be homogenized

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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.

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compressing things into a restricted number of categories.

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

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

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.

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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

As you can see here, the characteristics of a del.icio.us entry are a link, an optional extended description, and a set of tags, which are words or phrases users attach to a link. Each user who adds a link to the system can give it a set of tags -- some do, some don't. Attached to each link on the home page are the tags, the username of the person who added it, the number of other people who have added that same link, and the time.

Tags are simply labels for URLs, selected to help the user in later retrieval of those URLs. Tags have the additional effect of grouping related URLs together. 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 pamberger

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.

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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.

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

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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.

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

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

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

Highlighted by trumble