Shirky: Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags
Clay Shirky's writings about the Internet, including Economics and Culture, Media and Community, Open Source
Hasnain says:
Long, and worth reading for anyone who works or is interested in ontologies and classification.
"They missed the end of this progression, which is that, 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."
"One of the biggest problems with categorizing things in advance is that it forces the categorizers to take on two jobs that have historically been quite hard: mind reading, and fortune telling. It forces categorizers to guess what their users are thinking, and to make predictions about the future."
Posted on 2014-09-22T02:54:00+0000