Ontologista

Ontologista, baby, as they say in The Terminator. Here is an interesting new blog about ontologies. It refers to my ontology rant, which I guess is something I have to get used to. When I do this in real life people just ignore me, but in the blogosphere it looks like world works differently. It correctly identifies that piece's writing style as condescending. If I'm not just talking to myself any more I should start to clean up my tone.

That blog is on to something. Both ontologies and taxonomies are just a means to an end, a practical solution to a specific problem. Actually they are solving both known and unknown problems at once. Before a piece of information is salted away, we need to predict why someone will want retrieve it later, what question will they ask to which this document will be the answer, and how to help them distinguish right from wrong answers. Computers are not good at answering questions. They would rather you tell them what you already know about the answer.

It's like looking for something in someone else's kitchen. The person who puts things away puts them where they themselves would look for them later on. You have to get into their head a bit, figure out their system, and then adapt. The system could seem mysterious or irrational at first. For instance, if the kitchen is kosher, then virtually identical plates for meat and plates for dairy will be in different places. They are solving a problem that you may not have. But any simple classification, no matter what it is based on, is more valuable than debating industry standards about the one correct way to classify everything.

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