[Ontology is overrated…][ont]
I’m a quarter of the way through reading this, but it got me thinking… one reason that heirarchies worked well in the physical world is that you can’t have something in more than one place at one time. So you’d try and find the most likely location for an object (via the card catalog, for example) and head over to that section of the library. All the cross-referencing is done with the little cards in the catalog; those are the tags. It wouldn’t make sense to have six copies of a book in six different locations, would it?
But in the virtual world, we can apply the tags directly to the idea.
By the way, the article illustrates _very well_ the Western bias in most of our heirarchic organization systems.
[ont]: http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html
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