(2005-01-24) Shirky Ontology Taxonomy

Clay Shirky on Ontology vs Taxonomy. Tags are multi-dimensional, and only look flat, in the way Venn diagrams look flat... Ontology is a good way to organize objects, in other words, but it is a terrible way to organize ideas, and in the period between the invention of the printing press and the invention of the symlink, we were forced to optimize for the storage and retrieval of objects, not ideas... The move here is from graph theory (arrange everything in a tree graph, so that graph traversal becomes the organizing principle) to set theory (sets have members, and the overlap or non-overlap of those memberships becomes the organizing principle.)