17/05/2005

Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags provides a decent overview of the failings of a traditional system of content categorisation when applied to online content, the alternatives provided by user-developed classification, and it’s roots in hyperlinking on the web.

The Library of Congress has something similar in its second-order categorization — “This book is mainly about the Balkans, but it’s also about art, or it’s mainly about art, but it’s also about the Balkans.” Most hierarchical attempts to subdivide the world use some system like this.

Then, in the early 90s, one of the things that Berners-Lee showed us is that you could have a lot of links. You don’t have to have just a few links, you could have a whole lot of links.

…

If you’ve got enough links, you don’t need the hierarchy anymore. There is no shelf. There is no file system. The links alone are enough.

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