Categorizing and Collabularizing:

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Categorizing and Collabularizing

• Research on how to marry the benefits of
  folksonomy with ontology to create the
  collabulary of the Internet

Cheralyn Cofer
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References

• Christopher Allen - Tracing the Evolution of
  Social Software
• K. Eric Drexler - Hypertext Publishing and the
  Evolution of Knowledge
• Clay Shirky - Ontology is Overrated (talk)
• Clay Shirky - The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and
  Worldview
• Cory Doctorow - Metacrap Putting the torch to
  seven straw-men of the meta-utopia
• Peter Merholz - a "professional" blogger
• Wikipedia

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Where We Left Off
In our last discussion of Information
Architecture we touched upon the following
concepts of how to organize Internet content

• Organization Schemes mutually exclusive,
  ambiguous, metaphor-based.
• Controlled Vocabularies a carefully selected
  list of words and phrases which tag information
  to make it more searchable. These terms are
  chosen and organized by trained professionals
  (including librarians and information scientists)
  who possess expertise in the subject area.
• Hierarchies a system of ranking and organizing
  where each element of the system, except for the
  top element, is subordinate to a single other
  element.
• Taxonomies a hierarchical arrangement of
  categories.

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Where Were Going Today
Information Architecture
Tracing the Evolution of Social Software
Shirkys references
Clay Shirky
Hypertext Publishing and the Evolution of
Knowledge
Ridiculous anti-Shirkian blogger
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Terminology
Heres some terms that well come across in our
discussion

• Controlled Vocabularies
• Ontology
• Semantic Web
• Voodoo categorization
• Signal Loss
• Folksonomy
• Organic Categorization
• Long tail
• Collabulary

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First Stop Tracing the Evolution of Social
Software, Christopher Allen

• Early motivations behind social software
• 1940s Memex Wholly new forms of encyclopedias
  will appear, ready-made with a mesh of
  associative trails running through them, ready to
  be dropped into the memex and there amplified.
• 1950s Arpa and Licklider There has to be some
  way of facilitating communication among people
  without bringing them together in one place.
• 1960s Augmentation "By 'augmenting human
  intellect' we mean increasing the capability of a
  man to approach a complex problem situation, to
  gain comprehension to suit his particular needs,
  and to derive solutions to problems.

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First Stop Tracing the Evolution of Social
Software, Christopher Allen

• Early motivations behind social software
  continued
• 1970s Office Automation The use of this term
  swiftly become quite generic, and was used by all
  the major computer companies of the time.
  However, any ideas of collaboration become lost
  in the ideas of process and automation.
• 1980s Groupware Intentional group processes
  plus software to support them.
• 1990s Origin of Social Software A suitable
  hypertext publishing medium can speed the
  evolution of knowledge by aiding the expression,
  transmission, and evaluation of ideas.
• 2000s Evolution of Social Softwarere Social
  Computing First, there's no need to apologize
  for studying social effects by pretending that
  they are a form of computing (the old argument
  about computers as computing vs communicating
  devices goes back to Licklider in the early 60s,
  and its disheartening to see the communications
  people agonizing over it 40 years on).

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Hypertext K. Eric Drexler (1990s)

• The big idea Media affect the evolution of
  knowledge in society. A suitable hypertext
  publishing medium can speed the evolution of
  knowledge by aiding the expression, transmission,
  and evaluation of ideas.
• Goal to improve critical discussion
• Compares benefits of hypertext to traditional
  mediums
• Abundant, effective criticism will decrease the
  amount of misinformation in circulation, thereby
  decreasing the generation of further
  misinformation. Hm, have we reached this goal?
• Implications of critical discussion - believing
  the naysayers
• Hypertext publishing requires good filters to
  minimize low-quality material.
• A meme

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Ontology is Overrated Clay Shirky

• Ontology In computer science, an ontology is a
  data model that represents a domain and is used
  to reason about the objects in that domain and
  the relations between them. Ontologies are used
  in artificial intelligence, the semantic web, and
  software engineering as a form of knowledge
  representation about the world or some part of
  it.
• Traditional categorization Periodic Table

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Ontology is Overrated Clay Shirky

• Traditional categorization Libraries and the
  Dewey Decimal System
• Most common
• Problem of bias

Dewey, 200 Religion 210 Natural theology 220
Bible 230 Christian theology 240 Christian moral
devotional theology 250 Christian orders
local church 260 Christian social theology 270
Christian church history 280 Christian sects
denominations 290 Other religions
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Ontology is OverratedClay Shirky

• Yahoos directory compromise, and the _at_ symbol

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Ontology is OverratedClay Shirky

• Googles shelfless search
• Idea of tagging (Folksonomy) as bottom-up
  categorizing (de.licio.us, flickr)
• Organic categorizing
• Moving from the binary categorizing to
  probabilistic, the Venn diagram of overlap
• The long tail
• Filtering done post-hoc recall Chris Allens
  emphasis on effective hypertext filtering as key
  to quality control

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The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview Clay
Shirky

• The Semantic Web a project aimed to make web
  pages understandable by computers, so that they
  can search websites and perform actions in a
  standardized way.
• Syllogisms
• From Dodgson
• - No interesting poems are unpopular among
  people of real taste - No modern poetry is free
  from affectation - All your poems are on the
  subject of soap-bubbles - No affected poetry is
  popular among people of real taste - No ancient
  poetry is on the subject of soap-bubbles
• This allows you to conclude that all your poems
  are bad.
•  
• This illustrates the kind of world we would
  have to live in for this form of reasoning to
  work, a world where language is merely math done
  with words. The problem of the Semantic Web.

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Meta-C_at_pPutting the torch to seven straw-men
of the meta-utopiaCory Doctorow

• Highlights of the seven fallacies
• Anecdote on my conditional yardstick and
  critical discussion.

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Anti-shirkyPeter Merholz

• Poor rhetoritician
• Ego-centric website
• A criticism of Merholz criticism of Shirky
• What a wonderful combination of "ad-hominem" and
  "straw-man" fallacies. I must say that I stopped
  my reading when arrived at the phrase about
  "black-and-white distinction between evil
  hierarchy on one side and good tags on the
  other". I don't know where in Clay's article you
  can read something remotely similar to that.
  Actually, he gives a list of situations where
  ontology is the best choice.
• Only after disliking his commentary was I
  interested in his (lack of) authority the
  professional blogger vs. esteemed university
  professor

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A possible solution to the debate

• A possible solution to the shortcomings of
  folksonomies and controlled vocabulary is a
  collabulary, which can be conceptualized as a
  compromise between the two a team of
  classification experts collaborates with content
  consumers to create rich, but more systematic
  content tagging systems.
• A collabulary arises much the way a folksonomy
  does, but it is developed in a spirit of
  democratic collaboration with experts in the
  field. The result is a system that combines the
  benefits of folksonomies -- low entry costs, a
  rich vocabulary that is broadly shared and
  comprehensible by the user base, and the capacity
  to respond quickly to language change -- without
  the errors that inevitably arise in naive,
  unsupervised folksonomies.