Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

you send me into orbit! yes, the harmony of the spheres can only be heard in perfect, unadulterated and absolutely still, silence--thus the mystery.

David, Interesting meme you're pursuing with the "chain of being." Seems to be in the air these days: Even I recently posted on the idea in an organizational context, "We need a 'Web' not a 'chain' of command" (http://timothygrayson.com/blog/archives/000333.html). Love the bigger context you've given it though.

Thanks for another great JOHO.

As a librarian-type, I have some misgivings about your (seeming?) characterization of categorization as being (equivalent to) tree-like structures.

Many categorization systems are tree structures, sure. But, I think it is a mistake to equate categorization with tree structures. In fact, I would suggest that a lot of categorization is like a web of small, loose descriptions (as is apparent on *the* web).

I think the deeper issue is that tree-like organizations tend to produce tree-like classification *systems* (i.e., in their own image, because they are talking to themselves).

Some of those tree schemes are highly bureaucratic, some are more authoritarian; some seem dedicated to some provincial ideal of "objectivity" and some blatantly baised or idiosyncratic--it usually is pretty indicative of the organization(s) behind the scheme.

Yahoo's categorization of the web looks (pretty exactly, btw) like Yahoo's org chart and business model for how it wants to expand its organization. They have an "Autos" section in their scheme, in part, so they can have an "Autos" department!

Google's database holds a classification scheme (or, more likely, a number of schemes). But, it is a scheme that looks like the organization that produced it, which is more the web itself than the clueful company that believed in the web and got out of its way.

Jay, thanks. You've put well some of the major themes of the book I've been trying to outline for the past 18 months. (I love the "Auto" example you give.)

You're right, I do think of categorization as bucketing (often but not always hierarchical and tree-like), whereas webs, to my way of thinking, don't bucket things. So, I don't think of webs as categorizations, although this may just be a semantic difference...although it may also be a Semantic Difference.

I think it is worth considering how much of categorization, as we tend to think about it, is defined by the physical basis (and context) of categorization. The physicalness let's us imagine things as having external qualities or objectively observable features that can be fit into categories.

(And, to the degree we see the physical world as a hierarchy, we tend to define a hierarchy of categories.)

So, what happens when you remove that physicalness?

I think part of what is happening on the web is not that categorization is less important, but that a less physical form of it is thriving on the web--actually, as a major element of the web's places-in-motion space/time.

So, I think it is like body to web-body: physical-categorization to web-cateorization.

A bucket is a relatively solid, static, thing, and a lot of traditional classification systems are about crafting (or, as the systems get large, manufacturing) relatively solid, static, containers.

But, I'm saying that maybe a bucket is very different on the web than a bucket in the physical world! Among other things, online, everybody makes their own buckets instantly, makes them any way they want, and changes them any time they want.

(Also, I might suggest that maybe what is going wrong with *the* Semantic Web is that it is trying too literally to represent physical categorization buckets online--perhaps not unlike Southwest Airline's original website that tried to look and function, literally, like an airport ticket counter!)

Eerily close to the very thing I was writing about today in my perpetual book proposal. The tree-structure is baked into 3D life because 3D allows for containers within containers, as opposed to FlatLand where if you're in a box inside a box, you can't get out. Further, since Aristotle (and before, actually) we've defined what a thing is by its genus/species: You look up a level to see what other things it's like and you look across to see how they're different. Remove the physical constraints and now you're talking about defining things differently.

Oy, have to run to a plane. But, Jay, stop writing my book for me, for Lord's sake! :)