Monday, December 13, 2004
Shirky to Talk on the Rise and Fall of Ontology
O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2005: "This talk begins by exploring the rise of ontological classification. In the period after the invention of the printing press but before the invention of the search engine, intellectual production was vested in books, objects that were numerous but opaque. When you have more than a few hundred books, categorization becomes a forced move, even if the categories are somewhat arbitrary, because without categories, you can no longer locate individual books.
It will relate this 'opaque objects' problem to the more recent history of organizing pure data--a hierarchical file-system; then the emergence of 'symbolic' links, which undermined the hierarchy but left intact the idea that data 'was' somewhere, and that all other pointers were second-class; to our current system, where the URL makes all links equally symbolic.
The URL represents the inversion of the traditional scale, making the mere label and not the mighty ontology the key site of organizational value. The talk will go on to describe the tension between productive and extractive modes of metadata, and the effects of scale, heterogenous user assumptions, na�ve and flat classifications, lowered barriers to production and tagging, and long-lived classifications by individuals. These are all things that are inimical to ontology but predictive of extractive organizational value, in the manner of Google.
The talk ends by discussing key technologies in the spread of extractive value--Google, del.icio.us, fotonotes, purple numbers, RDF--and wrapping up with some predictions about where value might be encapsulated in user-tagged, semi-structured data in the future."
It will relate this 'opaque objects' problem to the more recent history of organizing pure data--a hierarchical file-system; then the emergence of 'symbolic' links, which undermined the hierarchy but left intact the idea that data 'was' somewhere, and that all other pointers were second-class; to our current system, where the URL makes all links equally symbolic.
The URL represents the inversion of the traditional scale, making the mere label and not the mighty ontology the key site of organizational value. The talk will go on to describe the tension between productive and extractive modes of metadata, and the effects of scale, heterogenous user assumptions, na�ve and flat classifications, lowered barriers to production and tagging, and long-lived classifications by individuals. These are all things that are inimical to ontology but predictive of extractive organizational value, in the manner of Google.
The talk ends by discussing key technologies in the spread of extractive value--Google, del.icio.us, fotonotes, purple numbers, RDF--and wrapping up with some predictions about where value might be encapsulated in user-tagged, semi-structured data in the future."
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