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Reading Notes: Ontology of Folksonomy

From: http://tomgruber.org/writing/ontology-of-folksonomy.htm

Apply semantic web technologies to the data of the social web.

Folksonomy is data that is emergent from shared information.

Folksonomy is not a taxonomy or even a collaborative categorization.

The emergent data from the actions of millions of ordinary untrained folks helps to counter spam-induced noise in search engines. It gives text-based search engines a fighting chance.

Folsonomy and Semantic Web are often presented as alternatives, but this is a false dichotomy.

Shirky's critique equates ontology with information organization. That heirarchical centrally controlled taxonomic categorization schemes are limited (such as the Dewy Decimal System).

Taxonomies do indeed limit the dimensions along which one can make distinctions - local choices at the leaves are constrained by global categorizations in branches - therefore, it's difficult to put things in their heirarchical places - and categories are often forced.

However, Shirky's critique relates only to a very narrow Ontologicial form and methodology. He equates ontology with a centrally controlled taxonomic effort.

[i don't get the distinction here - is the author saying that his proposed tagging system is a broader ontological approach and that many of the current "categorize the world's information" ontology efforts are indeed flawed?
]

Ontologies-as-conceptual-specifications enable multiple, independently developed databases of carefully categorized artifcats to interoperate. And for agents to reason about the differences among the vocabulary used in each of those independent databases.

[ok, is this the point? that the approach should be more conceptual than specific? it should describe relationships without describing these relationships in sentences and words? but isn't that the point of an ontology - to describe relationships via sentences?
]

Shirky's critique is really an attack on top down categorization --as a way of finding and organizing information--

[meaning that the author's proposal is not to use ontology for finding and organizing information? but just for representing relationships between disparate data sets?
]

There should be a common conceptualization of what tagging means - and a way for a service to correlate and connect tag data from one application to another. There must be a way of reasoning about the equivalence or relationship among tagging data across applications. This is an ontology of folksonomy.

The system must identify areas where systems will differ. Ontologies are as much about reasoning about incompatibilities as finding commonalities.

TagOntology is the effort to do this. tagcommons.org

Central is the notion that techniqyues of the semantic web, such as formal specification of structured data and reasoning across disparate data sources, can apply to the social web.

Example
Tagging(Object1, tag1, tagger1, source1)
Tagging(Object1, tag2, tagger1, source1)
Tagging(Object1, tag1, tagger2, source1)
This allows us to say something about a collection of tag data, independent of the specific applications they come from.

Reading Notes. Virtual Worlds: "Seeing Is Believing"

Reading Notes from "Seeing Is Believing" - Stanford Magazine Jan(?) 2008

• cameras track movement across an empty room, which is fed into VR goggles. The experience of a pit in the goggles makes author feel real fear of falling. To the brain, the virtual is indistinguishable from the real.
• "This form of pretending is so powerful that what happens online doesn't necessarily stay online"
• "in the real world, making eye contact increases your persuasiveness, but you can gaze at only one person at a time. In cyberspace, Bailenson's lab has found, you can make your avatar seem to gaze at multiple people; they'll pay more attention than they would in a face-to-face conversation, and be twice as likely to agree with you. In real life, mimicking people's behavior can persuade them; in cyberspace, where every movement is digitally tracked, you can be a more accurate and subtle copycat. Merely copying someone's head movements after a four-second delay makes them much more likely to agree with you, Bailenson found." - This is absolutely fascinating.
• "virtual reality takes pretend to a whole new level—it doesn't just fool the viewer, it fools you. Seeing your altered self in the third person can actually change the way you behave in real life."
  • "people who were given taller avatars behaved more aggressively in a virtual bargaining task than people with shorter avatars. When the subjects later repeated the task with a real person, “people who had been in taller avatars continued to bargain more aggressively face-to-face.”
  • people who had been in more attractive avatars during the exercise chose more attractive partners.
• People are wired to believe what they see, even in virtual reality, where everything one senses can be manipulated.
• what happens in VR  changes your behavior after VR -  i know this from playing mega life size Grand Theft Auto in my Brooklyn apartment - when I went out after a session - I'd have to tell myself that it was not OK to rip people out of their cars to steal them.
• "Fox wonders if seeing how exercise affects their avatars might help people stick to health plans in the real world, where the benefits of exercise aren't immediately visible"
• "why does Second Life look so much like suburban America?” "
• When photos of undecided voters were partially morphed into those of candidates, the voters would prefer a candidate with whom they'd been melded, but could not detect that the photo contained their own face

Wow, this was a great read.