Came across Clay Shirky’s talk at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference entitled "Ontology is Overrated: Links, Tags and Post-hoc Metadata". It’s worth listening to.
Just like me, Shirky is a
lakoff-ian (excuse the neologism): categories are embodied, espression of humanity, not abstract metaphysical entities (Plato’s ideas) that we aim to obtain.
I wrote about this already.
Still, Shirky misses one important point: ontologies are not overrated, they are just contracts, a (more or less explicit) agreement between different parties. Language is a contract as well. So are categories. So is metadata. So are APIs, protocols, plug shapes and their voltage, meters…. you name it! Many make the mistake of associating an ‘ontology’ with Plato’s metaphysical ideas, I think Shirky is one of them.
The semantic web is a bad name for an attemp to make data interoperability scale at a web level. Ontology are a bad name to describe relationships between symbols. That’s all there is, really.
Now, you use tags to categorize things for yourself, but instead of using a ‘controlled vocabulary’, taxonomy or ontology (depending on what field you come from, you will like to call them differently… which also is a metaproof of the point, but let’s move on), you invent your own.
People have been doing this forever. I mention Borge’s essays about this in another post.
Now, the real breakthru of folksonomical-based systems like del.icio.us or flickr is not the lack of structure or commitee-based design in the ontological space, but is the idea that if two people use the same term, it’s more probable than they meant the same thing than they meant different things.
That’s the secret sauce: it’s unlikely that a farmer would use del.icio.us to bookmark a page on how to grow apples, so "apple" in that sociological context means Apple Computers, nor fruits. What happens if it’s not? who cares!
This is the point where librarian exit the room screaming and I’m left there staring at the wall, thinking on how to enable ontologies to emerge out of the power law foam, but without librarians to puke on it and without people telling me to stop thinking like a librarian!
The problem is rather simple, really: words are not unique identifiers for concepts. Everybody knows this very well: synonyms exist in every language. So, all you need to start is to create unique identifiers for your tags, but if you don’t do it well enough, it doesn’t scale globally.
