browse vs. search: clean and dirty relativity
So this whole thing about ontology is more interesting than I intended to give it credit for. The world ‘ontology’ has briefly entered and escaped through my ears on various ocassions without receiving much thought or recognition on my part but the ‘Carving Up the World’ lecture managed to, how do I put this, managed to shift some inner attentiveness, yes that will do.
The relation to concepts in hard reality or virtuality is impacted on greatly through the categorisation of said information and the heirarchy in which that information is presented. Honest to the big man upstairs, I had no idea what this word ‘ontology’ meant but now it makes relative sense (I have not provided the meaning of ontology above).
The readings that I undertook gave a good insight to the uses and shortcomings of such a process ot theory. As a good example by Clay Shirky in his writing about the internet - ‘Ontology Overrated: Categories, Links and Tags’ - it defines the lines between what it is to browse and what it is to search. To browse is to be systematic and look through a range of data in ordered sequence to definitely find what you are looking for. To search is to look through a range data in an unordered spread to give you a possible or definite match to what you are looking for. Shirky’s example of Yahoo and Google was an easy way to understand this perception. This is a manner of clean versus dirty and in this case, highlights the benefits of sometimes being dirty.
So Yahoo was built upon the premise that ‘it knows’ and so ‘it will tell us’. Google was heralded because it changed that course and offered itself as ‘this is how I know it’ but ‘tell me how you know it’ and then ‘I’ll show you where it is known’ - this gives a wide range of possibilities from unrelated to highly related or better than what you were initially looking for - you choose.
I have only suggested a very very very marginal look at the application of ontology through this post but read the readings and lets discuss.
Read more:
Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links and Tags
What is an Ontoloy? And Why We Need Them
Ontology and Why I Am Not Obsessed With This Fancy Little Overrated Word
It Turns Out Both Bad Data and a Teaspoon of Dirt May Be Good For You
