I'm fascinated with tagging, ontology and organizing information, and consider current methods badly flawed; so much so that I tried to make a startup out of my ideas (turned out to be too complex/ambitious).
My conclusion was that improving on existing systems is possible, but will require an awful lot of effort. The way forward, IMHO, is a kind of probabalistic ontology, based on mining lots of data combined with careful use of human intelligence.
Unfortunately that's as far as I got with the idea, though I hope someone else can make more progress than I did. Improving the ability to organize information seems to me to be a crucial problem that gets far too little attention, probably because it is a very hard problem. I will be surprised and disappointed if the best we can do 10 years from now is just search, categorisation and tagging.
The criticism is indeed fair, but I don't think it really sinks Shirky's key arguments. Shirky may have shortchanged professional ontologies and glossed over some details, but at the end of the day professional onotologies are expensive to create and maintain. With the explosion of content on the web, there's clearly a huge gap between free-text search and professional categorization.
The interesting part of the article for me (4 years later) is that it points to the promise of data mining tags, which we've only just begun to scratch the surface of.
I think that there's merit to his criticism of purely hierarchial classification, he just completely fails to acknowledge that to cataloging professionals this is old news.
(The "gee whiz, tags solve everything" hype has been sufficiently deflated elsewhere, IMHO.)
A few years back I was working on a blue-sky real estate database project. I spent a lot of time trying to decide between building the project with a triple store or an RDBMS.
The reason I mention this is that the parent notes that "professional onotologies are expensive to create and maintain" which is very true, but even worse, like Shirky's DSM example, you have to be an expert in the ontology to make good use of it!
To me, this was the critical argument against doing the project with a triple store, and ultimately, made me a pessimistic cynic of the semantic web. I can't put my finger on it, but it just feels way too complex to work in reality.
People don't like systems that manifest themselves as deterministic (not sure if that's the right word) but then act heuristically. However, people are fine with a heuristic system that acts that way. Ex: google.
I'm fascinated with tagging, ontology and organizing information, and consider current methods badly flawed; so much so that I tried to make a startup out of my ideas (turned out to be too complex/ambitious).
My conclusion was that improving on existing systems is possible, but will require an awful lot of effort. The way forward, IMHO, is a kind of probabalistic ontology, based on mining lots of data combined with careful use of human intelligence.
Unfortunately that's as far as I got with the idea, though I hope someone else can make more progress than I did. Improving the ability to organize information seems to me to be a crucial problem that gets far too little attention, probably because it is a very hard problem. I will be surprised and disappointed if the best we can do 10 years from now is just search, categorisation and tagging.