The world is abuzz with talk of ontology, folksonomy, facets.
- entry on mefi full of tasty links
- Leonard talks about his take on things, which I want to focus on right now.
Some cursory thoughts on Leonard’s entry. He says:
I believe that both disambiguation and synonym merging are relative non-issues. For the former, the ease of intersections almost makes it moot from the practical perspective of searching. For the latter issue, we are already beginning to see automated solutions (related tags).
And, later:
The first hurdle is, I suppose coming up with a convincing argument that hierarchies are worthwhile. I think quite obvious that in everyday life, we categorize and subcategorize often and that being a first-class object isn’t completely out of the realm of sense. The real question is if there’s a way of reintroducing hierarchy that doesn’t reintroduce the problems they caused in the first place.
I totally agree with him. Even though my paper lauded the advantages of lack of hierarchy (that, for instance, lack of hierarchy makes it easier to merge the personal ontologies of the masses, because hierarchies, in many case, have some ambiguity when it comes to ideal structure), I still think that the flexibility afforded by hierarchical faceted systems is really, really cool. This whitepaper from the makers of reiserfs that talks about their vision for the future of filesystems has long been an inspiration for me. (Among other things, this paper has some pretty nifty ways to transparently merge faceted hierarchy with non-faceted (that is, modern-day vanilla) hierarchy).
Del.icio.us doesn’t use hierarchy right now in its facetted organization. I may be misunderstanding Joshua Shachter’s comments on the delicious-discuss list, but his primary motivation for not using hierarchy seems more to be because it’s computationally heavy, and less because it’s ambiguous and harder to glean order out of hierarchical personal ontologies. I don’t know if this is short-sighted or not.
Leonard talks about namespace masking to simplify hierarchy, and I think that’ll be part of the eventual solution. The neat part about it is that this hierarchy can be statistically generated just like semantic-level tag splitting and merging. I’m not sure if Leonard’s incarnation solves the sparsity issue as he claims it does, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. It just means we need to keep looking for more strengthening solutions.
I wager that the lack of automated solutions for metonymy disambiguation and synonym merging (two sides of the same coin, really), and support for faceted hierarchy are things that are not here yet simply because the field is so young. But, really, I can’t wait to see what the field looks like a few years from now.