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

[Katherine Bertolucci]

Hi Everyone --

As someone who designs taxonomies from the client's perspective, I
appreciated Samantha's comment that even people who think alike may use
different vocabularies.  Also enjoyed Peter's succinct analysis of the issue
as "the false dichotomy of tagging and classification."

Before Ziya starts trawling the Mendocino spas for new clients, we should
set the record straight.  The geothermal gig was in downtown Oakland, with a
couple of journeys into the Nevada desert near Burning Man.  I went to the
hot springs on my own time and at my own expense.  That's one of the ways to
think like your client -- make their subject your hobby.

The hot springs are the primo example, but there are many ways to absorb
your client's culture.  When I designed an AIDS taxonomy for the Alameda
County Health Department, I attended a full showing of the AIDS Quilt, read
"And the Band Played On," and watched Whoopie Goldberg's safe sex videos,
all on my own time.  Whale watching along California's central coast was a
big help for a cetacean and marine mammal taxonomy.  Also watched sea otters
from a cliff at Big Sur.

When you think like your client, you become as interested in their topic as
they are.  They get a customized taxonomy and you get new knowledge.

Katherine Bertolucci
Isis Information Services
P O Box 627
Phoenix, AZ  85001
602-258-2035
katherine at isisinform.com
www.isisinform.com

> Message: 5
> Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 18:58:03 -0500
> From: "Samantha Bailey" <SBailey5 at mn.rr.com>
> Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] Re: Blasphemy: Ontology is Overrated?
> To: <IsisInform at aol.com>, <Sigia-l at asis.org>
> Message-ID: <017801c555bc$1aa21690$6401a8c0 at samanthamyh03g>
> Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="utf-8";
> reply-type=original
>
>
> >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
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 6
> Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 01:34:18 -0400
> From: Listera <listera at rcn.com>
> Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] Re: Blasphemy: Ontology is Overrated?
> To: SIGIA-L <Sigia-l at asis.org>
> Message-ID: <BEA7119A.B571%listera at rcn.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
>
> IsisInform at aol.com:
>
> > My theory of perspective taxonomy organizes information from the
viewpoint of
> > the client.
>
> That assumes you do or can 'think' like the client does...
>
> >  I learned to think like my geothermal clients by lounging around the
hot
> > springs of the California wine country.
>
> ..I'd like to get gigs like that too, but it's not always possible.:-).
>
> Indeed, for many projects the notion of 'client' is indeterminate: we
don't
> know who the client (in all variations) will/can be.
>
> In business terms, it's like delegating executive powers to field staff,
> without requiring them to go through a central bureaucracy. That's
shifting
> an organization's smarts to the periphery. Sure, a field rep may not have
> the wisdom of an executive with 15 years of experience sitting at the HQ,
> but what's important, at the end of the day, is the *aggregate* wisdom of
> the entire organization as a distributed decision making apparatus. It's
the
> Yahoo vs. Google phenomenon.
>
> Distributed decision making may not have the precision of central
planning,
> but it has lot of attenuating advantages, especially when you need to
scale.
>
> It's 2005, as an IA or a designer, we may not even be able to control our
> artifacts:
>
> <http://www.nivi.com/blog/article/greasemonkey-and-business-models/>
>
> Ziya
> Nullius in Verba
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 7
> Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 06:55:09 -0400
> From: "Peter Morville" <morville at semanticstudios.com>
> Subject: RE: [Sigia-l] Re: Blasphemy: Ontology is Overrated?
> To: <Sigia-l at asis.org>
> Message-ID: <20050511105535.71963292E33 at mail.asis.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> Clay's last name is actually Shirky, not Shirkey, though there are 554 web
> pages about "Clay Shirkey." According to Shirkey, I guess the authors
behind
> those 554 pages must have something in common beyond their use of
> language...perhaps a shared attitude towards the false dichotomy of
tagging
> and classification :-)
>
> Peter Morville
> President, Semantic Studios
> www.semanticstudios.com