Wait, you don't have to do pay-per-view?

I just discovered Vincent-Olivier Arsenault's blog UP4. Dear lord I love reading stuff like this. I only wish there were more content - guess I'll have to dig through the archives. Here's a taste:

Shirky proposes that ontologies are overrated in the sense that formalizing an all-encompassing worldview is not only a pretentious utopia, it is also culturally destructive because it actually destroys a lot of useful data (namely the diversity of ontological opinions web users have on a particular class of objects). Contextually, it also implies that (semantic) web engineers expect to eventually come up with a universal, exclusive, permanent, single meta-ontology built of binary aggregations of multiple domain expert-edited ontologies that don't overlap.

Ahhhh... anything relating to knowledge management has me at hello. It's like porn for my brain. Apparently "folksonomies" are in vogue now. From his post Emerging things I hate:

This basically is saying that users are stupid and are not able to make their own full-fledged entity-relation ontologies and can only understand and use non-hierarchical, non-interoperable, non-localizable totally dumb tags (like technorati, flickr and al.).

This reminds me of Cory Doctorow's Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia (available here, though I'm not sure if that's where it lives.) From the section "Schemas aren't neutral":

In meta-utopia, the lab-coated guardians of epistemology sit down and rationally map out a hierarchy of ideas... This presumes that there is a "correct" way of categorizing ideas, and that reasonable people, given enough time and incentive, can agree on the proper means for building a hierarchy... The conceit that competing interests can come to easy accord on a common vocabulary totally ignores the power of organizing principles in a marketplace.

¶ 5:49 AM /  permalink /