Article: Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags

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

This article has a really good summary of ontology and the differences between different categorisation systems and the impacts that the web has on these. Traditional systems are hierarchical because they depend on being able to place an object into a place and category. In web based systems we lose the sense of a physical object - each 'item' or url, for example, doesn't have a physical location and so it can be linked many times from many different locations. There's a great set of diagrams expanding on this here.

It also highlights some of the biases inherent in ontological categorisation. It talks about the way Yahoo's cataloguing sets up a bias towards a commercial venture and a specific hierarchy by allowing any link to have only three entries and by specifying where these entries are. It goes on to compare this to a search system, like on Google, where the user gets to decide what links and what each page means.

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. Given this requirement, the views of the catalogers necessarily override the user's needs and the user's view of the world. If you want something that hasn't been categorized in the way you think about it, you're out of luck.

The search paradigm says the reverse. It says nobody gets to tell you in advance what it is you need. Search says that, at the moment that you are looking for it, we will do our best to service it based on this link structure, because we believe we can build a world where we don't need the hierarchy to coexist with the link structure.

Newer systems such as tags and the way that LJ defines it's interests act in a different way to categorisation. Because the users get to define what the meaning of a link is, and each user can define it in a different way, it no longer functions in a hierarchical way. Instead the meaning of the link is partially dependant on the way, and who, of where you encounter it - whether you trust the source or have a relationship or whether you have a similar understanding of what their system means. The following explains the difference quite well.

I learned this from Brad Fitzgerald's design for LiveJournal, which allows user to list their own interests. 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.

The cataloguers first reaction to that is, "Oh my god, that means you won't be introducing the movies people to the cinema people!" To which the obvious answer is "Good. The movie people don't want to hang out with the cinema people." Those terms actually encode different things, and 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.

The new service del.icio.us, a 'social bookmarking site' is also examined as an example of this concept where the links is coded and explained by other people who share a similar meaning and possible relationship with you.

It's a fascinating article on the shape of the web and it's well written and pretty easy to follow. I think there's something in this that ties into some of the concepts of multiplicity (more on this later) and the way that each person's view/shape/encounter with the web is a very different experience. Hierarchical systems don't quite work because we don't have a central meaning for our experience or our desire and participation on the web. Each of us wants and is something different.