Metadata
- Author: Clay Shirky
- Full Title:: Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- Document Tags:: Second brain,
- URL:: https://web.archive.org/web/20190729120538/http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html
- Read date:: 2025-03-23
Highlights
People have been freaking out about the virtuality of data for decades, and you’d think we’d have internalized the obvious truth: there is no shelf. In the digital world, there is no physical constraint that’s forcing this kind of organization on us any longer. (View Highlight)
Both librarians and computer scientists hit the same next idea, which is “You know, it wouldn’t hurt to add a few secondary links in here” — symbolic links, aliases, shortcuts, whatever you want to call them. (View Highlight)
if you’ve got enough links, you don’t need the hierarchy anymore. There is no shelf. There is no file system. The links alone are enough. (View Highlight)
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. (View Highlight)
When Does Ontological Classification Work Well? (View Highlight)
• Small corpus • Formal categories • Stable entities • Restricted entities • Clear edges (View Highlight)
You can see there’s a tag “to_read”. A professional cataloguer would look at this tag in horror — “This is context-dependent and temporary.” Well, so was the category “East Germany.” 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. (View Highlight)
It comes down ultimately to a question of philosophy. Does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world? (View Highlight)