"This piece is based on two talks I gave in the spring of 2005 -- one at the O'Reilly ETech conference in March, entitled "Ontology Is Overrated", and one at the IMCExpo in April entitled "Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification." The written version is a heavily edited concatenation of those two talks.

PART I: Classification and Its Discontents

Q: What is Ontology? A: It Depends on What the Meaning of "Is" Is.

Cleaving Nature at the Joints

Of Cards and Catalogs

The Parable of the Ontologist, or, "There Is No Shelf"

File Systems and Hierarchy

When Does Ontological Classification Work Well?

Domain to be Organized

Participants

Mind Reading

Fortune Telling

Part II: The Only Group That Can Categorize Everything Is Everybody

"My God. It's full of links!"

Great Minds Don't Think Alike

Tag Distributions on del.icio.us

Organization Goes Organic"

"There's both a good and bad side to virality. Products with viral hooks that are so strong they coerce people to sign up--in order to achieve a huge initial viral rush--are obviously bad. Not only do they alienate users, they don't lead to a sustainable business. On the good side, you have organic growth, which comes as a natural byproduct of something that spreads simply because people like it--eBay, Hot or Not, and Flickr. I can't think of an antonym for it."

"The decision to make all the photos public versus private was motivated by the fact that conversations are where metadata happens."

"Basically I've been bookmarking things all these years for future, unknown students. I've been building a search engine for queries that I had no idea would be coming my way."

so, two comments:
(1) "computable web" != "canonical names." Common mistake.
(2) the "ambiguity" of reference that [some of] the semantic web people are working to eliminate here isn't the ambiguity he's describing ("My ... apartment has been described as being in the Lower Haight, Duboce Triangle, or Upper Castro, depending on who you ask..."), where one "thing" can have multiple names -- but the exact opposite, where one name refers to many (different) things, in different contexts. Imagine if "Duboce Triangle" was the name of a neighborhood *and* a newspaper about that neighborhood, *and* also the collective name for all the people living within 2 miles of Warden's apartment. A person might even use the same noun (or noun phrase) to refer to all three things, within the space of a single unit of text. It'd get pretty confusing. Using "canonical" names is a (admittedly somewhat simplistic) attempt to get around *that* problem, rather than the one he's describing; and saying that you "embrace" the ambiguity that's latent here is equivalent to saying that you don't care if the web is unusable to certain groups of people (e.g. scientists, researchers) who *are* concerned with avoiding this sort of ambiguity. "People searching for movie times" is just a test-case for "people searching for data about a 'gene'."

Also, I love someone who writes critically about Wolfram (.data, Alpha, and all the rest) as much as the next guy -- but saying, "the web is written for humans to read" is pretty laughable when it's not coming out of the mouth of a guy named "Firefox." The web is written for your web browser, and no number of SXSW presentations will change that.

</rant>

#3 in Jon Udell's series on tagging; 2012.02.22.

Tagging mechanisms and strategies part 3: #taxonomy and #folksonomy « Jon Udell http://t.co/x3P3wC84 #judell #tags

“Beyond tag hierarchies, Smith talks about some concepts I hadn’t heard before:
* Pivot Browsing: ”Moving through an information space by choosing a new reference point — a pivot — for exploring the system” (105). The ability to look at information based on users, resources, and tags provides various pivot points in the data. Pivot points seem similar to facets but more radical in the way they change the reference point.
* Pace Layering: ”Aspects of society change at different rates” (91). For example, tags suit user needs as they’re moving quickly to make sense of new information; taxonomies and ontologies are more appropriate later, when the dust settles and users have more time.
* Synonym Rings: “A synonym ring gives two or more words an equivalent meaning” (69). These rings establish synonym equivalents for tags, so that “Web20″ and “Web_2.0,” for example, would be equated with one another.”

"We consider in this paper top-k query answering in social tagging systems, also known as folksonomies. This problem requires a significant departure from existing, socially agnostic techniques. In a network-aware context, one can (and should) exploit the social links, which can indicate how users relate to the seeker and how much weight their tagging actions should have in the result build-up. We propose an algorithm that has the potential to scale to current applications. While the problem has already been considered in previous literature, this was done either under strong simplifying assumptions or under choices that cannot scale to even moderate-size real world applications. We first consider a key aspect of the problem, which is accessing the closest or most relevant users for a given seeker. We describe how this can be done on the fly (without any pre-computations) for several possible choices - arguably the most natural ones - of proximity computation in a user network. Based on this, our top-k algorithm is sound and complete, while addressing the scalability issues of the existing ones. Importantly, our technique is instance optimal in the case when the search relies exclusively on the social weight of tagging actions. To further reduce response times, we then consider directions for efficiency by approximation. Extensive experiments on real world data show that our techniques can drastically improve the response time, without sacrificing precision."