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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)

#61

Post by taeric »

fluorocarbon wrote: post #41
ChuckMcM wrote: 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…

> Consider for the moment the problem of 'fake news' ... without getting into the debate of what is and isn't true This comment reminds me of another Shirky essay [1]. He says: > [This is] the pattern for descriptions of the Semantic Web. First, take some well-known problem. Next, misconstrue it so that the hard part is made to seem trivial and the trivial part hard. Finally, congratulate yourself for solving the tri…

That is now one of my favorite essays. Thanks for posting.

It does amuse me how much this framing of problems happens. Both in the annoying cases of arm chair quarterbacks, and in the cases of folks that take on problems previously thought of as too difficult.

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

#62

Post by sonnyblarney »

maxerickson wrote: post #46
sonnyblarney wrote: post #29

This is a great post. The problem with the thesis is that just because classical ontology doesn't work for the entire internet, doesn't mean that we can't apply it in many domains. Formal ontology could be used very well in a variety of areas. Informal, or less concise ontology again in many areas. And leave tagging for the rest.

Aren't tagging and "informal ontology" pretty much equivalent?

Well there are surely other informal ways of doing 'ontology'.

The point being - more rigorous methods can definitely be valuable in areas, and I don't think it's a good idea to ignore this fact.

It's a bygone issue because there wasn't a critical mass in place to make it work, but there could be.

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

#63

Post by aaron695 »

This has been known to be totally incorrect for 10+ years now. Is this about bad predictions?

Tags failed.

No one uses them. (#hashtags are not tags, they are more channels)

Can you think of one site that uses them and it's useful?

Ever looked a library book up and the tag is why you got a good result?

The study I saw showed all the actual value on Flickr came from the title of a photo, not the tags.

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

#64

Post by camelite »

cdbattags wrote: post #55
ChuckMcM wrote: 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 res…

The resiliance of any fake news detection heuristic is impossible to prove until it is consequential enough to incentivise subversion.

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

#65

Post by james_s_tayler »

"when people were offered search and categorization side by side fewer and fewer people used categorization to find things"

Two thoughts pop into my mind which guide me gently to the conclusion we need to be careful here.

  1) every configuration is a set of trade-offs
  2) any parameter or paradigm pushed to extreme produces perversion
On point number 1: categorization contains the benefit of discoveribility when you lack the information necessary to form the search query in the first place.

On point number 2: search forces you to generate the query and direct your attention towards a given subject. However, some of the most important discoveries you have ever made in your life were when other people held your attention in conversation and kindly directed it in a direction it wasn't going but that arrived at an illuminating destination.

We need all implementations to some degree to get all possible benefits. I suspect this is why suggestion algorithms have flourished but in doing so they create echo chambers because they are a charicature of yourself bending your own ear.

If only algorithms could suggest what you needed to hear and not what you wanted to hear.

Some books I have bought at my local bookstore I never would have found on Amazon. It's amazing what being able to direct our own attention and have the world organized in exactly that way has done for us, and it is equally as amazing as the paths we are lead down when we let other people direct our attention.

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

#67

Post by JetSpiegel »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #52
astazangasta wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.…

> I would happily pay for an aggregator that simply ejects facts

There is already the AP news ticker, or Reuters. Bloomberg has the same thing for financial matters. If you read only that, you will die of boredom.

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

#68

Post by dithering »

ChuckMcM wrote: 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…

Putting aside the difficulty of building that database of true facts, and of parsing unknown facts out of English text, that solution feels like it's inviting an arms race. I can write a bunch of uncontroversial "true" facts into an article containing one or two false facts.

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

#69

Post by gnodar »

burtonator wrote: post #28

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…

> We're still getting users that want hierarchy though. I'm not sure what I want to do here.

Have you considered hierarchical tags?

As an example:

https://dmitryfrank.com/projects/geekmarks/article

I use it for my bookmarks, and I find it is a suitable balance between having some kind of hierarchy, while allowing for resources to be classified under several categories.

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

#70

Post by sah2ed »

burtonator wrote: post #28

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…

> For example, if you have two documents with the first tagged 'tech, microsoft' and the second tagged 'tech, linux' we can infer that tech is the parent of 'microsoft' and 'linux'

How do you account for the availability effect [0]?

To use your example, let's say that I tagged a document 'tech, microsoft' and the second is tagged 'linux, tech', because of the availability effect -- it's been a long time since I tagged documents causing me to add the 'tech' tag as an afterthought rather than as the first tag?

Better to keep things simple.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic

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