Tuesday, May 24, 2005
Notational Standards
discussion à
The next generation knowledge tools
Paul,
I
agree with the following points by Clay Shirky:
1. "it is often the case that old
systems get broken before people know what's going to take their place."
2. "you can extract a surprising amount
of value from big messy data sets."
3. "What I think is coming instead are
much more organic ways of organizing information than our current
categorization schemes allow"
Source:
http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html
But
the point I derive from these and many other observations is "Who needs
tags?" A tag [1]
is nothing more nor less than somebody's attempt to classify a text according
to some preconceived notion, which has a good chance of being (a) wrong, (b)
irrelevant, or (c) misleading.
You
can derive an enormous amount of information from the text of the web pages,
and the tags just get in the way.
John Sowa
[1] Editorial note: John is referring to the “metadata” tags that have been the center piece of literally billions of dollars of government effort in creating RDF (Resource Description Framework) based tagging of information.