Are Ontologies Overrated?

A fairly comprehensive, highly readable critique of ontologies as a classification method, as compared to more organic, user-driven, free-form organizing strategies. Some valuable guidelines for choosing between the two approaches.

References

Description

This article by Clay Shirky is a marvelous overview of the nature of ontologies, or classification systems, as opposed to organic, user-driven, and free-form organizing strategies. (The classic examples cited in each category are Yahoo's classifications of content, and Google's content-driven search capabilities.)

The writer argues that there are at least 5 characteristics that help make an ontology work:

  • small corpus of terms
  • formal categories
  • stable entities
  • restricted entities
  • clear edges
  • ,
and that there are 4 participant groups that help make an ontological system viable:
  • expert catalogers
  • authoritative source of judgment
  • coordinated users
  • expert users
  • .
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Posted November 27th, 2007 by graybeal
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