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Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags (2005)

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Re: Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags (2005)

#51
post #7

I enjoyed this piece, mostly because I disagree so strongly with it :-). Clay takes the topic of Ontology, contextualizes it into an impractical domain, and then calls it overrated. Cars are overrated too because they can't cross oceans right? When done correctly, ontology combined with knowledge graphs can make an impractical problem much more practical. Consider for the moment the problem of 'fake news'. What chara…

>And without getting into the debate of what is and isn't true

Nice try, but this is missing the whole point. This is the crux of the matter and the problem with the category of "fake news", and precisely why this ontology is garbage.

Re: Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags (2005)

#52
post #7

I enjoyed this piece, mostly because I disagree so strongly with it :-). Clay takes the topic of Ontology, contextualizes it into an impractical domain, and then calls it overrated. Cars are overrated too because they can't cross oceans right? When done correctly, ontology combined with knowledge graphs can make an impractical problem much more practical. Consider for the moment the problem of 'fake news'. What chara…

>And without getting into the debate of what is and isn't true Nice try, but this is missing the whole point. This is the crux of the matter and the problem with the category of "fake news", and precisely why this ontology is garbage.

I must absolutely disagree with you: in my opinion the problem of fake news stems from compartmentalisation of news sources (lack of their diversity), rather than lack of actual facts in the news sources.

The fact that you can read about the same topic in several (more often opposing) ways is already a reason to red-flag the piece in the first place. This isn’t readily available through any of the current newspapers. Everyone has an opinion.

I would happily pay for an aggregator that simply ejects facts (stated facts, not truths) from the stories. Then combines that with similar other pieces.

Re: Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags (2005)

#53

[2005] should be added to the title > This piece is based on two talks I gave in the spring of 2005 -- one at the O'Reilly ETech conference in March, entitled "Ontology Is Overrated", and one at the IMCExpo in April entitled "Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification." The written version is a heavily edited concatenation of those two talks.

Google has this dated as [2014] - June 14 to be exact. Google also shows the exploit-affected site title as mentioned in other comments...

https://www.google.com/search?source=lnt&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:1/...

Re: Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags (2005)

#55
post #7

I enjoyed this piece, mostly because I disagree so strongly with it :-). Clay takes the topic of Ontology, contextualizes it into an impractical domain, and then calls it overrated. Cars are overrated too because they can't cross oceans right? When done correctly, ontology combined with knowledge graphs can make an impractical problem much more practical. Consider for the moment the problem of 'fake news'. What chara…

I know this might be fuel to the fire on here, but I think Tanushree's work at Georgia Tech in her paper "A Parsimonious Language Model of Social Media Credibility Across Disparate Events" [1] is a good stab at the "fake news" problem with a lens of "credibility".

As a disclaimer, we tried to get this model off the ground in YC summer 2017 batch but were rejected after the phone interview. I did not assist in the research; only an effort to publicize.

I whole-heartedly believe this is our best bet at combatting "fake news" online for the moment. Taking the lessons of "The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive" [2], we might tease out credibility instead of fact or fiction to help guide our biased/opinionated labels.

From the abstract:

"In other words, the language used by millions of people on Twitter has considerable information about an event’s credibility. For example, hedge words and positive emotion words are associated with lower credibility"

[1]: https://credcount.com/whitepaper.pdf

[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Most-Human-Artificial-Intelligence-Te...

Re: Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags (2005)

#56
post #12

The same is so true for programming, in particular OOP. In my experience, code is much easier to change when a loosely coupled set of interfaces is built as opposed to an hierarchy of classes.

Indeed. This is also why I think OOP is missing something to scale better in terms of flexibility and domain size. The ideal code structure for a particular need is rather arbitrary. OOP "prefers" things in a hierarchy, both in terms of inheritance, and in terms of an object being less powerful than a class (in most languages). You can force or use OOP outside of these, but it's unnatural in my opinion. For example,…

For example, why is it not easy to add an "onClick" event handler method to a particular button in a Java GUI?

Lack of pointers. An event reference is a double pointer: to the method and to the object that is "self" or "this" for the execution of the event handler. Since they refused to have pointers in the language, they devised that convoluted solution.

Re: Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags (2005)

#57
post #7

I enjoyed this piece, mostly because I disagree so strongly with it :-). Clay takes the topic of Ontology, contextualizes it into an impractical domain, and then calls it overrated. Cars are overrated too because they can't cross oceans right? When done correctly, ontology combined with knowledge graphs can make an impractical problem much more practical. Consider for the moment the problem of 'fake news'. What chara…

I agree with you and I would like to point out if the 16th century Catholic church had used the same process they would have concluded that Copernicus was 'fake news'.

It's a hard problem.

Re: Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags (2005)

#58

I think this highlights exactly the dangers of social media and communities centered around fixated niches. I've been thinking lately of how to remedy that and this post came up at just the right time to get the mind juices flowing. At a high level I see a decentralized community that doesn't rely on forums/tribes/subreddits and incentivizes tagging like old school del.iciou.us. This enables higher chance of cross po…

Eh, people will resist levers of control. Even levers with good intentions.

People seek a payoff. Even if you have some interconnect, that forces patterns of use, why are they crawling through your pipes?

Re: Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags (2005)

#59
post #31

I've been working on a tag-centric document manager for the last 90 days: https://getpolarized.io/ It allows you to tag and manage everything you're reading and the primary management metaphor is the 'tag'. It's a central repository for all your reading. PDFs, web content, and it supports annotation (highlights, comments, etc). There are a bunch of clear wins here. Related tags are awesome. You can build a bunch of r…

Tags do not fit spatial memory. Tags are utterly worthless in any spatial context. You're at the mercy of a search engine's implementation and index foibles for finding things through search queries. A hierarchy maps onto our spatial memory, which we use to figure out where we've been and go back to it. There's a lot to be said for maintaining spatial metaphors in information space. Another little detail here is that…

If you use modern NLP you can embed tags into vectors and then just use dot product between query and targets to rank them. There's even a fast library for that in Python called 'annoy'. It is capable of relating any query to any tag.

Re: Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags (2005)

#60
> You need a hierarchy to manage a file system.

I find this a strange assertion after several paragraphs which vociferously assert hierarchies are redundant in the virtual space. In fact, OS/400 is a 'single-level' store using objects, so it has even been shown in practice that you do not need filesystems to build a useful OS, if I am not mistaken.

Am I mistaken?

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