Ontology Is Overrated: Links, Tags, and the Death of Categories
2025-03-09
This essay challenges the conventional wisdom of ontology-based categorization in the digital age. The author argues that pre-defined categories, reminiscent of library catalogs, are constrained by physical limitations and human biases, ill-suited for the dynamic nature of the web. Instead, they propose a more organic system based on links and tags, allowing for free-form user labeling and valuable insights from large, messy datasets. Using Yahoo! and Google as examples, the author demonstrates the superiority of link-based search over pre-defined categories, showing how tagging systems better adapt to the scale, diversity, and dynamism of online information.