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

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Public Comment

on 2005-12-22 by jgentry

Good stuff.

on 2006-07-27 by davemorehouse

Clay Shirky's enlightening distillation of how tagging fundamentally differs from catgorization, and offers new organizational paradigms based on user-centric ontologies. Yeah, something like that.

on 2006-08-02 by jasonfleming73

The rise of user-developed classification.

on 2006-08-10 by worldnagata

面白そう。ただし英語。だから、面白“そう”。なんとかせねばと思いつつ。

on 2006-10-25 by rjjjsp

Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags 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 & T

on 2006-11-03 by pistos

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." Th

on 2006-11-14 by mikeheth

file systems - Google vs. Yahoo

on 2006-12-03 by sholman

seminal essay by Clay Shirky

on 2007-09-04 by forestfortrees

This piece is based on two talks Clay 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."

on 2007-10-28 by dedlily

excellent discussion!!

Public Sticky notes

I want to argue that even the ontological ideal is a mistake. Even using theoretical perfection as a measure of practical success leads to misapplication of resources

Highlighted by mstrohm

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.

Highlighted by mstrohm

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 jgentry

letting individuals create value for one another, often without realizing it.

Highlighted by jgentry

Signal Loss from Expression

Highlighted by jgentry

That strategy of designing categories to cover possible cases in advance is what I'm primarily concerned with, because it is both widely used and badly overrated in terms of its value in the digital world.

Highlighted by jgentry

In a world where publishing is cheap, putting something out there says nothing about its quality. It's what happens after it gets published that matters.

Highlighted by jgentry

They also underestimate the loss from erasing difference of expression, and they overestimate loss from the lack of a thesaurus.

Highlighted by jgentry

The other big problem is that predicting the future turns out to be hard, and yet any classification system meant to be stable over time puts the categorizer in the position of fortune teller.

Highlighted by jgentry

Yahoo, faced with the possibility that they could organize things with no physical constraints, added the shelf back

Highlighted by jgentry

Yahoo is saying "We understand better than you how the world is organized,

Highlighted by jgentry

The essence of a book isn't the ideas it contains. The essence of a book is "book." Thinking that library catalogs exist to organize concepts confuses the container for the thing contained. The categorization scheme is a response to physical constraints on storage, and to people's inability to keep the location of more than a few hundred things in their mind at once.

Highlighted by jgentry

Tagging, by contrast, gets better with scale.

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Venn diagram

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The solution to this sort of signal loss is growth.

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You merge from the URLs, and then try and derive something about the categorization from there. This allows for partial, incomplete, or probabilistic merges that are better fits to uncertain environments -- such as the real world -- than rigid classification schemes.

Highlighted by jgentry

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

The Parable of the Ontologist, or, "There Is No Shelf" #

A little over 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 was the first really significant attempt to bring order to the Web. As the Web expanded, the Yahoo list grew into a hierarchy with categories. As the Web expanded more they realized that, to maintain the value in the directory, they were going to have to systematize, so they hired a professional ontologist, and they developed their now-familiar top-level categories, which go to subcategories, each subcategory contains links to still other subcategories, and so on. Now we have this ontologically managed list of what's out there.

Highlighted by mwesch

Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags

Highlighted by jagodakatarzyna

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 topyli

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.

Highlighted by topyli

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 mstrohm

an explicit specification of a conceptualization

Highlighted by mstrohm

What kinds of things exist or can exist in the world, and what manner of relations can those things have to each other

Highlighted by mstrohm

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

Highlighted by mstrohm

We understand better than you how the world is organized, because we are trained professionals. So if you mistakenly think that Books and Literature are entertainment, we'll put a little flag up so we can set you right, but to see those links, you have to 'go' to where they 'are'

Highlighted by mstrohm

Browse versus search is a radical increase in the trust we put in link infrastructure

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Browse says the people making the ontology, the people doing the categorization, have the responsibility to organize the world in advance.

Highlighted by mstrohm

It says nobody gets to tell you in advance what it is you need

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When Does Ontological Classification Work Well?

Highlighted by mstrohm

  • Small corpus
  • Formal categories
  • Stable entities
  • Restricted entities
  • Clear edges

    • Highlighted by mstrohm

  • Expert catalogers
  • Authoritative source of judgment
  • Coordinated users
  • Expert users

    • Highlighted by mstrohm

    If you've got a large, ill-defined corpus, if you've got naive users, if your cataloguers aren't expert, if there's no one to say authoritatively what's going on, then ontology is going to be a bad strategy.

    Highlighted by mstrohm

    This is voodoo categorization, where acting on the model changes the world

    Highlighted by mstrohm

    it forces the categorizers to take on two jobs that have historically been quite hard: mind reading, and fortune telling. It forces categorizers to guess what their users are thinking, and to make predictions about the future.

    Highlighted by mstrohm

    assertion that restricting vocabularies improves signal assumes that that there's no signal in the difference itself

    Highlighted by mstrohm

    You can't collapse these categorizations without some signal loss

    Highlighted by mstrohm

    They're not merging at the category level. They're merging at the globally unique item level

    Highlighted by mstrohm

    The Web is mainly notable for two things -- the way it ignored most of the theories of hypertext and rich metadata, and how much better it works than any of the proposed alternatives

    Highlighted by mstrohm

    market logic, where you deal with individual motivation, but group value

    Highlighted by mstrohm

    Each individual categorization scheme is worth less than a professional categorization scheme. But there are many, many more of them.

    Highlighted by mstrohm

    Market logic allows many distinct points of view to co-exist, because it allows individuals to preserve their point of view,

    Highlighted by mstrohm

    Signal Loss from Expression

    Highlighted by mstrohm

    Tagging, by contrast, gets better with scale

    Highlighted by mstrohm

    If there is no shelf, then even imagining that there is one right way to organize things is an error.

    Highlighted by mstrohm

    the idea that the categorization is done after things are tagged is incredibly foreign to cataloguers

    Highlighted by mstrohm

    You don't merge tagging schemes at the category level

    Highlighted by mstrohm

    you merge individual contents, because we now have URLs as unique handles.

    Highlighted by mstrohm

    This allows for partial, incomplete, or probabilistic merges

    Highlighted by mstrohm

    Critically, the semantics here are in the users, not in the system

    Highlighted by mstrohm

    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"

    Highlighted by mstrohm

    This is a single user's tags

    Highlighted by mstrohm

    Once you expand your time scale to include the actual life of the categorization scheme itself, you recognize that the distinction between temporary and permanent is awfully vague. There isn't in fact a binary condition of a tag that can or cannot survive any kind of long-term examination.

    Highlighted by mstrohm

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

    Highlighted by mstrohm

    value in aggregate

    Highlighted by mstrohm

    del.icio.us has no idea what the tags mean.

    Highlighted by mstrohm

    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 sperkins

    user-developed classification

    Highlighted by sallygla

    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 forestfortrees

    tagging -- free-form labeling,

    Highlighted by sallygla

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

    Highlighted by forestfortrees

    The sense of ontology there is something like "an explicit specification of a conceptualization."

    Highlighted by forestfortrees

    Lacking the right measurements, they assumed that gaseousness was an essential aspect -- literally, part of the essence -- of those elements.

    Highlighted by dedlily

    this is the Dewey Decimal System's categorization for religions of the world, which is the 200 category. 

    Dewey, 200: Religion
210 Natural theology
220 Bible
230 Christian theology
240 Christian moral & devotional theology
250 Christian orders & local church
260 Christian social theology
270 Christian church history
280 Christian sects & denominations
290 Other religions

    How much is this not the categorization you want in the 21st century?

    Highlighted by sallygla

    What's being optimized is number of books on the shelf. That's what the categorization scheme is categorizing.

    Highlighted by dedlily

    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.

    Highlighted by sallygla

    Highlighted by dedlily

    on 2007-10-28 by dedlily

    the key point is non overlapping

    on 2007-11-26 by sallygla

    Very true. A strength and goal of LCSH

    It is organized into non-overlapping categories that get more detailed at lower and lower levels

    Highlighted by dedlily

    The categorization scheme is a response to physical constraints on storage

    Highlighted by dedlily

    frailty of human memory

    Highlighted by sallygla

    the obvious truth: there is no shelf

    Highlighted by rickdude

    There is no file system. The links alone are enough.

    Highlighted by dedlily

    Browse versus search is a radical increase in the trust we put in link infrastructure

    Highlighted by dedlily

    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 carlaarena

    at the moment that you are looking for it, we will do our best to service it based on this link structure

    Highlighted by dedlily

    The other big problem is that predicting the future turns out to be hard, and yet any classification system meant to be stable over time puts the categorizer in the position of fortune teller.

    Highlighted by sallygla

    LiveJournal makes absolutely no attempt to enforce solidarity or a thesaurus or a minimal set of terms, no check-box, no drop-box, just free-text typing. Some people say they're interested in movies. Some people say they're interested in film. Some people say they're interested in cinema.

    Highlighted by dedlily

    You can't collapse these categorizations without some signal loss

    Highlighted by dedlily

    The presence of unique labels means that merging libraries doesn't require merging categorization schemes.

    Highlighted by dedlily

    Now imagine a world where everything can have a unique identifier

    Highlighted by dedlily

    Well-managed, well-groomed organizational schemes get worse with scale

    Highlighted by jhknight

    Tags are important mainly for what they leave out

    Highlighted by dedlily

    "Each individual categorization scheme is worth less than a professional categorization scheme. But there are many, many more of them."

    Highlighted by dedlily

    robustness and cost of creation

    Highlighted by dedlily

    The Filtering is Done Post Hoc - There's an analogy here with every journalist who has ever looked at the Web and said "Well, it needs an editor." The Web has an editor, it's everybody. In a world where publishing is expensive, the act of publishing is also a statement of quality -- the filter comes before the publication. In a world where publishing is cheap, putting something out there says nothing about its quality. It's what happens after it gets published that matters. If people don't point to it, other people won't read it. But the idea that the filtering is after the publishing is incredibly foreign to journalists.

    Highlighted by lindseybp

    The loss is from the multiplicity of points of view, rather than from compression around a single point of view. But in a world where enough points of view are likely to provide some commonality, the aggregate signal loss falls with scale in tagging systems, while it grows with scale in systems with single points of view.

    Highlighted by dedlily

    The solution to this sort of signal loss is growth

    Highlighted by dedlily

    question isn't "Is everyone tagging any given link 'correctly'", but rather "Is anyone tagging it the way I do?

    Highlighted by dedlily

    using a thesaurus to force everyone's tags into tighter synchrony would actually worsen the noise you'll get with your signal. If there is no shelf, then even imagining that there is one right way to organize things is an error.

    Highlighted by dedlily

    on 2007-10-28 by dedlily

    IMPORTANT. see rizoma

    The existence of an odd or unusual tag is a problem if it's the only way a given link has been tagged, or if there is no way for a user to avoid that tag

    Highlighted by dedlily

    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 lindseybp

    Organization Goes Organic

    Highlighted by dedlily

    without a goal

    Highlighted by dedlily

    the semantics here are in the users, not in the system.

    Highlighted by carlaarena

    the semantics here are in the users, not in the system

    Highlighted by dedlily

    The tag overlap is in the system, but the tag semantics are in the users. This is not a way to inject linguistic meaning into the machine.

    Highlighted by dedlily

    It's all dependent on human context

    Highlighted by carlaarena

    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 carlaarena