Clay Shirky – Ontology is Overrated

If there’s one prominent trait to web2.0 it’s tagging. Tags are Vox Populi, and as said: “Vox Populi, Vox Dei”. The anarchic Tagging (or Folksonomies) has burst in the midst of an Ontological effort to put some order to the World, by using Semantic Web standards to build domain-experts’ ontologies. It is a fight on Hegemony: the ruling Ontological elite, armed with scholar domain experts vs. John Doe, the layman from the street. Yet, as Shirky explains, there’s also a fundamental difference on how the World is seen. Ontologists see Reality as Objective, and believe their vocation is to document it once and for all, while Taggers see Reality as Subjective, and therefore (implicitly) reject any unified model of Reality.

Technopod Rating: 9

Clay Shirky – Ontology is Overrated

Original Podlink: Clay Shirky – Ontology is Overrated

References:

Clay Shirky’s Writings About the Internet

Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags

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