I personally don't think ontologies are useless for categorizing, though I'll admit that they are overrated. In fact they are mostly arbitrary.
One of the things that disturbed me most about hypertexts when I first started reading them (Eastgate texts actually) was that I never felt sure I'd covered the graph. So I've always liked the idea of one distinguished, though arbitrary, spanning tree. It's OK if my ontology is different from yours. In fact, I have several of my own, all mixed together (tags give me this). So it's really a blend of heirarchies - in fact, over time I incorporate other's peoples habits of organization as I learn about a subject. And that's one of the things that intrigues me about delicious - the possibility of my own evolving spanning trees for all my information, and everyone else's. Of course the "assorted unsortables" seems to be the biggest category, and I'm not so worried about covering the entire graph anymore ;) Just thinking out loud. -Randy Fischer On 5/17/05, Gen Kanai <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Clay's newest piece has a lot on many topics relevant to our mailing > list including del.icio.us itself. > > Highly recommended reading. > > http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html > _______________________________________________ > discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.del.icio.us/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss > _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.del.icio.us/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
