Folksonomy Taxonomy Philosophy

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

I love playing The Book of Questions types of games with friends and colleagues, but when it comes to answering those types of questions myself, I’m a terrible waffler. When I play these games with my friend, Steph, she often complains scornfully, “You’re such a ‘P’.” “P” refers to the “Perceiving” Myers-Briggs personality type, which refers to folks who are highly context-sensitive (also known as “wafflers”).    (LNM)

Suffice it to say, I hate truisms (except for that one). You could even call me a “philosophical relativist,” which according to Elaine Peterson, would make me a fan of folksonomies. Also true. And in a metaphysical twist that will drive the less philosophically-inclined (and Steph) crazy, if you were to ask me if folksonomies were better than taxonomies, I would respond, “That’s not a valid question.” Folksonomies and taxonomies are not quite apples and oranges, but they’re not apples and apples either. Debating the two is intellectually interesting, but it obscures the real opportunity, which is understanding how the two could potentially augment each other.    (LNN)

The impetus for this little outburst is Gavin Clabaugh‘s recent piece on folksonomies. Gavin (who cites Peterson’s essay) argues that taxonomies are better for finding information than folksonomies. Do I agree with that? It depends. Clay Shirky outlined some situations when taxonomies are better for search and vice-versa in his excellent essay, “Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags”.    (LNO)

What troubles me about the claim at all is that it highlights a distinction that I find to be misleading. In Elaine Peterson‘s essay, “Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy,” the main problem she cites has to do with philosophical relativism. Folksonomies allow it; traditional classification does not.    (LNP)

What is philosophical relativism? If I show you a picture of a mono-colored object, is it possible for that object to be both black and white? If you answered yes, you’re a philosophical relativist.    (LNQ)

On the surface, “philosophical relativist” might sound like another term for “dumb as hell.” But, what if the picture was of a person? And what if that person had an African-American father and a Caucasian mother? Now is it possible to classify this photo as both “black” and “white”?    (LNR)

Language is highly context-sensitive. Philosophical relativists acknowledge this. Believe it or not, so do librarians and traditional taxonomists. A taxonomy attempts to make classification more useful by restricting the scope to a single context. If you happen to be operating within that context, then this works great. There are plenty of situations when this is the case (Gavin cites the medical community, which is a great example), but there are also plenty of situations when it’s not.    (LNS)

Folksonomies allow for multiple contexts, but that does not make them inherently less useful than taxonomies. As Clay points out in his essay, in practice, there’s a long tail of tags applied to different concepts. If something is tagged “black” by 98 people and “white” by two, you can be pretty sure that the object in question is “black.” Scale essentially transforms a folksonomy into a taxonomy with a little bit of noise that can easily be filtered out (if desired).    (LNT)

Frankly, I think the concern is less about whether taxonomies are inherently better than folksonomies and more about whether so-called experts should have a role in constructing taxonomies. Gavin also alludes to this, when he describes a conversation with two friends in a San Francisco coffee shop. (I don’t want to out those friends, but I will say that one of them runs a company named after the faithful companion of a certain oversized lumberjack from American folklore. I will also say that Gavin is an outstanding tea companion, and that we’re working on a project that has very little to do with folksonomies, but that will make the world a much better place regardless.)    (LNU)

Gavin’s friends suggested that folksonomies were a great way of collaboratively developing a taxonomy. Gavin partially agreed, but expressed some doubt, stating:    (LNV)

Rather than the wisdom of a crowd, I’d recommend the wisdom of a few experts within that crowd. In the end you’d end up with a more accurate and useful taxonomy, with half of the wasted bandwidth, and in probably a tenth of the time.    (LNW)

I can actually think of many situations where I would agree with this. One is Pandora, the music recommendation service built on top of the Music Genome Project. The Music Genome Project is a formal ontology for classifying music developed by 50 musician-analysts over seven years. By all accounts, the service is extraordinarily good. Chris Allen sang its praises to me at the last WikiWednesday, and it was all the rage at the original Bar Camp.    (LNX)

But having experts involved doesn’t preclude using a folksonomy to develop a taxonomy. Is a folksonomy developed by a small group of experts any less of a folksonomy?    (LNY)

In 2002, Kay-Yut Chen, Leslie Fine, and Bernardo Huberman developed a prediction market using Wisdom of Crowds techniques for financial forecasting of a division of HP. The market was 40 percent more accurate than the company’s official forecast. The catch? The people playing the market were the same people doing the official forecast. The difference was not in who was doing the predicting; the difference was in the process.    (LNZ)

I’m a historian by background. I have a great appreciation for the lessons of the past, which is reflected in my patterns-based approach towards improving collaboration. Five years ago, I reviewed Elaine Svenonius‘s wonderful book, The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization, where I wrote:    (LO0)

Fortunately, a small segment of our population, librarians, has been dealing with the problem of information organization since 2000 B.C. Who better to turn to in our time of need than people with thousands of years of accumulated expertise and experience?    (LO1)

There is a tremendous amount of past knowledge that I’m afraid is being passed off as trite and irrelevant, when in fact it is even more relevant today. How many people building tagging systems know about Faceted Classification? How many of these developers know of Doug Lenat‘s brilliant research on Cyc, or that a huge subset of the Cyc ontology is open source? On the flip side, how many librarians and ontologists are needlessly dismissing folksonomies as not as good, and hence irrelevant?    (LO2)

Philosophical debates over taxonomy and folksonomy are exactly that: philosophy. I love philosophy. I enjoyed Peterson’s essay, and I’d recommend it to others. Curiously enough, David Weinberger, one of folksonomy’s foremost evangelists, is also a philosopher by background. (Read his response to Peterson’s essay.)    (LO3)

However, philosophy sometimes obscures reality, or worse yet, opportunity. We should be focusing our efforts on understanding how taxonomies and folksonomies can augment each other, not on picking sides.    (LO4)

The Varieties of Second Life Experience

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

I liked Clay Shirky‘s commentary last month on Second Life, along with Howard Rheingold‘s qualifications in the comments. More than anything, Clay seemed to be lashing out against thoughtless discourse, which is a big pet peeve of mine as well. Of course, posts like these generally generate more thoughtless discourse. It’s the cost of having open conversations on the Internet. The benefit is that the few gems that emerge generally outweigh the noise.    (LND)

I particularly enjoyed Mark Oehlert‘s response to Clay and others. I had the pleasure of listening to Mark evangelize Second Life over lunch a few months ago, and it was almost enough for me to dip my toes there for the first time, something I’ve resisted for almost two years now. I’ve continued to refrain for reasons I’ll explain some other time, but when I do finally decide to check things out, you can bet I’ll be asking Mark for a tour.    (LNE)

Despite my own skepticism, Clay’s commentary, and the fact that I haven’t played with it myself yet, I think Second Life and 3D MMOGs in general are important, and I will continue to pay attention to them. I’m reminded of William James, who in The Varieties of Religious Experience, writes of the relationship between intense, religious experiences and our minds, how we live our lives, and truth itself.    (LNF)

Regardless of what the actual numbers of users are, regardless of the sum impact these environments have actually had on the world today, one thing that we can’t dispute is that some nontrivial number of people have had intense, important experiences within these environments. This fact alone suggests that there is something transformational there, something that is worth further exploration.    (LNG)

Engelbart’s “Whale” Slides

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

I call my favorite set of Doug Engelbart slides the “whale slides.” He calls them the “Coevolution Frontier.” They show a graph of collective tool utilization versus human systems development. His first slide shows our typical view of the distribution among organizations around the world.    (LN2)

   (LN3)

Looks like a sperm whale, huh? The x-axis shows how effectively organizations are using tools. The y-axis shows the corresponding effectiveness of human systems, such as organizational design and processes. A few observations. There is a broader spectrum of effective tool usage than there is of human systems. The spectrum of tool usage effectiveness is approximately the same for those on the cutting edge of human systems development as it is for those on the trailing edge. However, the spectrum of human systems development is significantly larger for those on the cutting edge of technology than it is for those on the trailing edge. The red square indicates the most cutting edge organization today. The dotted lines indicate where most organizations would like to be, both in the near future and twenty years from now.    (LN4)

Stop for a moment and think about this picture. Think about what an organization representing the red square looks like. Think about what it would be like to be on the dotted lines.    (LN5)

Overall, the graph is weighted more heavily towards the cutting edge of both axes. It’s an optimistic view, based entirely on Doug’s perception of the world, or more accurately, his perception of other people’s perceptions. But it doesn’t particularly impress Doug, who thinks this is more accurate:    (LN6)

   (LN7)

The only difference is that the dotted lines have moved much further out. The message? When we think about what’s possible, we’re thinking too small.    (LN8)

But this still doesn’t impress Doug, because he thinks we’re still thinking too small. His vision looks more like:    (LN9)

   (LNA)

Now think about what an organization on the dotted lines would look like. Compare it to your earlier thoughts from the first slide. How are they different?    (LNB)

What I love about these slides is that they force you to raise your expectations and think much, much bigger. We can always do better, much, much better.    (LNC)

Standards of Education

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Last November, Sunlight Foundation organized a meeting in San Francisco centered around Open Data / Open Government (dubbed “ODOG”). As what might be expected at a gathering of excellent people facilitated by Allen Gunn, it was a terrific event. While we covered tons of interesting ground, the thing that stood out for me the most was something that Salim Ismail said.    (LMP)

Salim suggested that the two prerequisites for an effective democracy were access to information and educated citizens. He then noted that he had lived a third of his life in the U.S., a third in India, and a third in Europe, and of all three locations, the U.S. had the least educated citizenry.    (LMQ)

I found myself citing Salim a week later in a spirited conversation about the state of the world with a friend, who challenged me to define exactly what I meant by an educated citizenry. I thought for a moment, then responded, “I will consider our citizenry educated when over 90 percent of Americans can identify the U.S. on a world map.”    (LMR)

I don’t know what the exact metric should be, but the essence of the metric should be clear. Last year, the National Geographic Society sponsored a study of geographic literacy in this country. The results?    (LMS)

  • 63 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 could not identify Iraq on a map of the Middle East.    (LMT)
  • 50 percent could not identify New York on a map of the United States.    (LMU)

A few years ago, I learned of another horrifying stat. 52 percent of Japanese primary and secondary students have never seen a sunset or a sunrise. That’s up from an equally horrifying 41 percent in 1991.    (LMV)

Folks in my business like to draw distinctions between information and knowledge, or knowledge and wisdom. Whatever you call the ends of the spectrum, the pattern is the same. As you move towards knowledge and wisdom, the secret sauce is context, meaning, and actionability.    (LMW)

Context is a funny creature. I can use all sorts of data and rhetoric to justify or oppose war, but the fact that my grandfather was kidnapped and killed by North Koreans during the Korean War certainly colors my judgement. I don’t claim any moral superiority in my opinions, but I certainly have context that not everyone has, and the essence of that context is very human.    (LMX)

I’d like people to have at least some human context before making judgements of import. At minimum, I think people should be able to identify a country on a map before expressing opposition or support for attacking it. At maximum, I think people should know others from that country, or even better, have spent time there themselves. I think people should experience at least one sunset or sunrise before expressing judgement about environment policy.    (LMY)