Monday, April 05, 2010

Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags


This is the title of a powerful treatise written by Clay Shirky, in which he strives to "convince you that a lot of what we think we know about categorization is wrong."  Much thanks to David Weinberger's blog www.everythingismiscellaneous.com for pointing out this article.  The take home message is quite similar to some of the "Beyond Categories" ideas I've tried to promulgate in my meager attempt to understand why progress in computer vision has reached a standstill.  For anybody interested in understanding the limitations of classical systems of categorization, this article is a worth a read.

4 comments:

  1. Andrey Pavlov2:45 PM

    I think this Shirky guy got the whole idea of ontology wrong. Definitions, definitions, definitions.

    ReplyDelete
  2. What do you think is a more appropriate definition of ontology?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous3:20 PM

    I believe he is using ontology as it pertains to information science in which case he seems correct to me.

    ReplyDelete
  4. A good description of what is an ontology and how it pertains to AI/Robotics can be found here:

    http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/kst/what-is-an-ontology.html

    ReplyDelete