Taxonomy, hierarchy, folksonomy, whatever...
Came across the following while doing some research for a project:
From atomiq.org
UPDATE after thinking a bit about this: I totally agree on the focus on what people need, but is "finding" the only activity that classification should support? For example, in a collection of recipes, classifying a dish as Canadian only helps me find it if I already know it's Canadian, or if I'm looking for Canadian dishes in general (for whatever reason). But it also captures some knowledge about the recipe, or maybe even about the whole collection ("aha, 1% of these recipes are Canadian") which people can use to figure out what to do next. So a good classification not only helps people "find shit" but also "find out shit".
But classification is really about something much simpler and more practical: people finding shit.
In that context, it's hard to understand this religious fervour around tags. The litmus test for good classification is not "does it use tags?" but "does it help people find shit?" There's much more to it than that, but that's the simplest formulation.
From atomiq.org
UPDATE after thinking a bit about this: I totally agree on the focus on what people need, but is "finding" the only activity that classification should support? For example, in a collection of recipes, classifying a dish as Canadian only helps me find it if I already know it's Canadian, or if I'm looking for Canadian dishes in general (for whatever reason). But it also captures some knowledge about the recipe, or maybe even about the whole collection ("aha, 1% of these recipes are Canadian") which people can use to figure out what to do next. So a good classification not only helps people "find shit" but also "find out shit".
8 Comments:
Max,what profession would you have followed if computers or computational devices were not invented?(you may refer to any time period upto the early 1930's).
p.s can you recommend a healthy and TASTY recipe(not necessarily canadian) for lentiles, or other pulses for a vegetarian pizza junkie?
By Anonymous, at August 17, 2005 6:26 AM
These are deep questions, will need to address them in a later posting.
By Max Melchior, at August 17, 2005 8:48 AM
with ref. to your update what percentage of the canadian recipes involve maple syrup, moose meat etc., can be a further iteration involved in the process. information management is becoming an increasing bottleneck.
p.s i hope someone can post a good recipe for lentiles, (sans raw onions> lethal). Inshaella.
By Anonymous, at August 18, 2005 7:41 AM
I find french green lentils (de puy) to be delicious, you could cook them in stock, then drizzle with olive oil and maybe lemon, mix with (cooked) onions and garlic, etc. Serve with smoked moose or caribou, wild rice, and cranberries for a typical canadian meal...
By Max Melchior, at August 18, 2005 9:35 AM
thanks, but a light drizzling of maple syrup will counteract the sharpness of the cranberries, unfortunately I can't source caribou or moose flesh in london can i substitute with alligator?
By Anonymous, at August 20, 2005 8:07 AM
Sure, you can substitute alligator - cook like lentils.
How many people in London do you think would like to taste moose, carribou, or beaver? Maybe there is an opportunity to export these great Canadian delicacies?
By Max Melchior, at August 24, 2005 10:28 PM
perhaps you'll find the radicchio chomping islingtonites willing to embrace 'new world flavours' of moose, caribou et al, but the meat-and-two-veg crowd, you can forget it, some have yet to hear of cheese cake.
less than a decade a go ostriche meat production and farming in the UK was said to reveloutionise our diets but nothing came of it and lots of entreupeneurs lost their shirts on that. let it be said you never lose money underestimating the public. if I had a mercenary slant and an entreupeneural bone in my body i would thrust that bone in the direction of providing an online porn business, despite its near saturation of the web space.
wich reminds me you also mentioned beaver, we already have it freely available on most highstreets on weekend evenings usually comes with its own chips.
By Anonymous, at August 30, 2005 8:08 AM
If you are looking for a taxonomy navigator, why not try out an open source tool at semantical.org.
Also, the problem with all this taxonomy, folksonomy stuff is the lack of standards on agreement--a "lingua franca" if you will. Until then we will suffer like the Tower of Babel in having to translate our different tongues.
By eric, at October 23, 2005 6:12 PM
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