[Sigia-l] Re: Blasphemy: Ontology is Overrated?

[Samantha Bailey]

>Clay likes tagging because the individuals do all the work.  Ideally they 
>get exactly what they want, but >in reality they get what their 
>classification skills allow them.

I listened to this too and agree with the points you make. My concern with 
relying exclusively on tagging withhout attempts to either fit into some 
more comprehensive scheme that addresses synonyms and term relationships is 
that not only do folks using these systems get what their classification 
skills allow them--others using the system are limited to their ability to 
guess how other people think (tag). While Shirkey has a point that we can 
glean values and similarities through language, I think it's a mistake to 
assume that people wo are like minded will think & speak with the same 
vocabulary--in reality we often don't. In addition, the idea that I only 
want to find things associated with people who think like me seems limited 
to a particular kind of searching. We often do have reason to find things 
outside the realm and scope of our personal experience and classification 
schemes with synonym and related terms support lets us venture outside our 
inherently limited sphere of knowledge.

sb



Samantha Bailey | samantha at baileysorts.com