sardonick

A paper I wrote on ontologies (and, more directly, folksonomy) for a databases class I’m taking.

Summarizes much of the thought that’s out there in the blogosphere. There’s a lot more I wanted to cover, but I was space-constrained. Here’s a preliminary version, full of rushed thoughts and unpolished wordsmithing. Will upload a cleaner, more fluent, and web-friendly version later, along with my summarization notes.

Later, in my copious spare time.

Some caveats:

• I’m an armchair information architect who’s done lots of thinking but had no formal education outside of web-punditry
• This is a rough, last-minute hack for a grad-school paper. Might be revised if I get around to it.
• I really wanted to put more information into this (Kmconnection has some great comparisons of the Dewey Decimal System vs other ontologies I would have liked to quote. Additionally, I’m actually not as firm a subscriber to this whole “down with hierarchy” movement as the paper would have you believe.), but was constrained by assignment size.
• Intended audience has little-to-no exposure to social software/computing. A degree of introduction is necessary that some of my readership might find needless.
• Please forgive my overuse of passive voice–my writing is a bit rusy
• UPDATE: whoops this got leaked before I was ready for it. Keep in mind that this isn’t a final final draft

That being said, here it is:
Folksonomies: The New School of Ontology
(or, plain html (in-progress–no footnotes))