Current mood:	contemplative
Current music:	Close to Me - The Cure
Entry tags:	academics, interesting ideas, technology

Ontology & Tagging
Poking around on LibraryThing (An awesome site, thanks ellefromtheeast), I came across this article:
http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html
It's a well written, accessible discussion of ontology and classification, as related to web technologies in particular. It has some interesting things to say about "tagging"-a phenomenon that's becoming popular nowadays, what with lj and flickr and various other places instituting the ability to tag entries. I like tagging a lot as a developing technology, and I'm very interested to see where it's going.

Here's an excerpt from the article from a section on lj's "interests" system:

"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."

A bit later, he says "We are moving away from binary categorization -- books either are or are not entertainment -- and into this probabilistic world, where N% of users think books are entertainment....It comes down ultimately to a question of philosophy. Does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world?"

I have a lot of thoughts rolling around in my head about this, but can't quite put them in paper (on the screen?) yet. I agree with pretty much everything Mr. Shirky says in this article, and there's a lot of ideas buried in it that my brain needs to work on a bit more. If you have any interest in these things, or if you're just curious about what I've been babbling about in my grad school application or when I talk about my work, then I urge you to take a look at this article.