Shirky Saves Sanity

Well, mine at least. As I look at the amount of traffic coming in from people who want MSN 7 hacks, I feel kind of bad writing about semantic web stuff.

del.icio.us provides again with a Shirky entry on tags & ontology.

I knew all this stuff already, but now I see it.

I can still have my wonderful semantic web by smushing URIs, because that's all people are really tagging.

Merged from URLs, Not Categories - You don't merge tagging schemes at the category level and then see what the contents are. As with the 'merging ISBNs' idea, you merge individual contents, because we now have URLs as unique handles. You merge from the URLs, and then try and derive something about the categorization from there. This allows for partial, incomplete, or probabilistic merges that are better fits to uncertain environments -- such as the real world -- than rigid classification schemes.

That's a relief. Infact, it seems so bleedingly obvious, but I never even considered it, I just whinged about the lack of information in tagsonomies.

Sanity has return. Oh, and I kick ass at my new job: I'm in a development team of 5 and one of the most productive, even if it is only my third day.

Go architechture Dan, GO!