Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags

I am going to be contraversial in my opinions. Firstly, I also have mixed feelings about the guy and his presentation. I agree he is a good, natural speaker, but he is arrogant and makes generalisations that are unlikely to be true - the aims of yahoo for instance.

One of the things I do agree with, and tell me if I'm wrong (I'm a computer scientist remember), is that although the intention of classification schemes is to organise knowledge, in libraries what they actually do is determine where books are stored. You cannot deny that correlated facts and ideas are scattered around different sections of libraries. It is physically impossible to map the organisation of a library's resources to the context of a user's search. This does not mean, however, that classification schemes are useless - far from it.

Another point I agree with him about is the transfer of understanding into digital environments by using metaphors. Metaphors, such as the shelve as Shirky puts it, give affordances about how a system works - fine! But they also have negative features. I think we can design efficient systems without them.

The paper can be found (here) and the talk (here)