Ontologies, Taxonomies, & Folksonomies

Clay Shirky. What a name. But he does say some things and people listen to him. Close to what I'm studying is his piece on how ontologies are overrated. The part about ISBNs, URIs, unique identifiers got me thinking. The uniquely identified item, the instance, the individual as the global entity? Hmmn. No need to abstract higher levels that will delimit groups of individuals? Link to link to link and so it will go. How do we devolve our brains to do that? But come to think of it, despite my training in librarianship, much of my most precise and relevant article retrievals come from following citations than from following a well-defined search strategy. Google Scholar actually works for me in finding relevant citations which I can then look up in the databases and electronic journals of the university.

Joseph Busch. Now there's a librarian. His Taxonomy Strategies company seems to be in good business. All kinds of structures - hierarchies, networks, tables, etc. can all coexist in infospace. Carve your niche. Depends on the purpose, I suppose. Anywho, the Montague Institute has something to say about managing taxonomies.

Folksonomies Tap People Power ... Sure, why not. There's enough structure in links and networks. Add to that the sensibility of people's tags. Fundamental categories or abstract classes are for other purposes, not for everyday objects that people interact with.

But I have promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep. And categories to know before I rest.

Revisiting Saussure

I came across the words diachrony and synchrony today. Reminded me of reading and re-reading that thin volume, Course in General Linguistics, by Ferdinand de Saussure. I wrote a short paper on Saussure's ideas for Bergesen's sociology class at UofA. Re-read it today and I'm surprised how clearly I was able to express my thoughts then. It bothers me that I seem to be losing the ability to express myself as clearly as that. My god, I'm growing senile!

Diachrony & synchrony. Things change across time and yet have definite structures at any one point in time...Knowledge grows hierarchically and collaterally (Palmer). Ranganathan's chains and arrays.

New from Old

It's that feeling again of traversing paths already trod on before in other contexts and which strains the mind to look at the problem anew lest one repeats the same arguments without adding anything essentially new. Despite being aware of the the current trend, particularly in phenomenological or interpretative accounts, to refute the idea that there is any essential order out there that can be discovered or that we have pre-stored models of the world in our heads just waiting to be unraveled, the questions that I still find intellectually stimulating are exactly those that dig deep into the nature of things in hopes of revealing any essential patterns or structures underlying them. Yet in my reviews of previous studies of essential structures in information organization, I keep coming to a dead end.

Consider for example the idea that there are levels of complexity and organization in the world of nature that can be viewed through a unified framework. This idea can be seen in the theory of integrative levels as written out by James Feibleman in 1954. To explain his theory, Feibleman set out his Laws of the Levels and Rules of Explanation as listed below:

Law of the Levels

1. Each level organizes the level or levels below it plus one emergent quality.


2. Complexity of the levels increases upward.


3. In any organization the higher level depends upon the lower.


4. In any organization the lower level is directed by the higher.


5. For an organization at any given level, its mechanism lies at the level below and its purpose at the level above.


6. A disturbance introduced into an organization at any one level reverberates at all the levels it covers.


7. The time required for a change in organization shortens as we ascend the levels.


8. The higher the level, the smaller the population of instances.


9. It is impossible to reduce the higher level to the lower.


10. An organization at any level is a distortion of the level below.


11. Events at any given level affect organizations at other levels.


12. Whatever is affected as an organization has some effect as an organization.

Rules of Explanation

1. The reference of any organizaation must be at the lowest level which will provide sufficient explanation.


2. The reference of any orgaanizaation must be to the highest level which its explanation requires.


3. An organization belongs to its highest level.


4. Every organization must be explained finally on its own level.


5. No organization can be explained entirely in terms of a lower or higher level.
   

The above laws and rules have been reconsidered in the 1960s by the Classification Research Group (UK) as a basis for constructing a general classification scheme. The members of the group have, up to that time, been successful in constructing special classification schemes using, among other ideas, Ranganathan's faceted scheme. But they felt that knowledge in specific domains eventually have to be related to a unitary framework of knowledge in order to be shared effectively. As far as I can follow their progress in my literature review, it seems like the group gave up on the idea.

The idea of integrative levels still appeals to me. I'm thinking about it in terms of the two-dimensionsal characteristic of the growth of knowledge as expressed in measures of specificity-generality, stability-flexibility, core-periphery, precision-recall, intension-extension, etc. However, imagining the growth of knowledge in this two-dimensional conceptual field seems limited and there must be other dimensions by which we can place a concept in a richer, dynamic environment. But going beyond two dimensions is beyond my intellect. My eyes start to glaze beyond the two-dimensional coordinate system of Descartes. Peirce's thirdness is a bit graspable but it takes a lot of thinking to rethink old knowledge structures in new ways . Meanwhile, the web is growing and it seems like people are happily getting the information they need in whatever combinations of information-seeking strategies they can put together.

Max from Min

Consider these:

• "the task of category systems is to provide maximum information with the least cognitive effort."
  
  - Rosch, E. (1999). Principles of categorization. In E. Margolis & S. Lawrence (eds.). Concepts. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press. p. 190
  


• "One comes nearer to the most superior scientific goal, to embrace a maximum of experimental content through logical deduction from a minimum of hypotheses."
  
  - attributed to Einstein in Holton, G. J. (1996). Einstein, history, and other passions : the rebellion against science at the end of the Twentieth Century. Reading, Mass. : Addison-Wesley. p. 203.
  


• Language "makes infinite use of finite media."
  
  - attributed to Wilhelm Von Humboldt in Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct. New York: W. Morrow and Co. p. 84.
  

How do the above statements relate to fundamental categories in classification as exemplified by Ranganathan's PMEST? Can a discrete combinatorial system like language be created in bibliographic classification systems? Are there fixed, formal structures in information organization which carry a creative principle such as found in mathematics?

Am I asking the right questions?

IS Questions

1. What are some enduring human goals that classification or information organization support?
   
2. What are the intellectually interesting questions about information organization? What are not? From what points of view?
3. What are the best elements/features of pre-Internet organizing schemes? What are their ineffective elements/features?
   
4. What are the special elements of today’s information environments that warrant a new way of organizing information?