Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags

Metadata

• Author: [[Clay Shirky]]
• Full Title: Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags
• Category: #articles
• URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20191117162526/http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html

Highlights

• Now, anyone who deals with categorization for a living will tell you they can never get a perfect system.
• The idea of a perfect scheme is simply a Platonic ideal. However, 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.
• If it's impossible to create a completely coherent categorization, even when you're doing something as physically related to essence as chemistry, imagine the problems faced by anyone who's dealing with a domain where essence is even less obvious.
  • Tags: [[categories]]
• 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. We can do without it, and you'd think we'd have learned that lesson by now. And yet.
  • Tags: [[categories]]
• 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 reason we know SUVs are a light truck instead of a car is that the Government says they're a light truck. This is voodoo categorization, where acting on the model changes the world -- when the Government says an SUV is a truck, it is a truck, by definition. Much of the appeal of categorization comes from this sort of voodoo, 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.
• You can't do it. You can't collapse these categorizations without some signal loss. The problem is, because the cataloguers assume their classification should have force on the world, they underestimate the difficulty of understanding what users are thinking, and they overestimate the amount to which users will agree, either with one another or with the catalogers, about the best way to categorize. They also underestimate the loss from erasing difference of expression, and they overestimate loss from the lack of a thesaurus.
  • Tags: [[categories]] [[ontology]]
• And once you can do that, anyone can label those pointers, can tag those URLs, in ways that make them more valuable, and all without requiring top-down organization schemes. And this -- an explosion in free-form labeling of links, followed by all sorts of ways of grabbing value from those labels -- is what I think is happening now.
  • Tags: [[favorite]] [[tags]]
• important mainly for what they leave out. By forgoing formal classification, tags enable a huge amount of user-produced organizational value, at vanishingly small cost.
  • Tags: [[social media]] [[tags]]
• Market Logic - As we get used to the lack of physical constraints, as we internalize the fact that there is no shelf and there is no disk, we're moving towards market logic, where you deal with individual motivation, but group value. As Schachter says of del.icio.us, "Each individual categorization scheme is worth less than a professional categorization scheme. But there are many, many more of them." If you find a 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. And if you can find any way to create value from combining myriad amateur classifications over time, they will come to be more valuable than professional categorization schemes, particularly with regards to robustness and cost of creation.
  • Tags: [[categories]] [[tags]]
• how something "should" be tagged. 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.
• • Merges are Probabilistic, not Binary - Merges create partial overlap between tags, rather than defining tags as synonyms. Instead of saying that any given tag "is" or "is not" the same as another tag, del.icio.us is able to recommend related tags by saying "A lot of people who tagged this 'Mac' also tagged it 'OSX'." 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.
    • Tags: [[ontology]] [[tags]]
• It comes down ultimately to a question of philosophy. Does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world? If you believe the world makes sense, then anyone who tries to make sense of the world differently than you is presenting you with a situation that needs to be reconciled formally, because if you get it wrong, you're getting it wrong about the real world.
• If, on the other hand, you believe that we make sense of the world, if we are, from a bunch of different points of view, applying some kind of sense to the world, then you don't privilege one top level of sense-making over the other. What you do instead is you try to find ways that the individual sense-making can roll up to something which is of value in aggregate, 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.
• 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.
  • Tags: [[favorite]]