Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Thinking outside the click (22 Dec 2004) One of the motivations for the Semantic Web is better search results. In the Semantic Web, the foundation of better discoverability is the construction of domain ontologies. The drive to describe and ontologize is not new; Western culture has been here before: a previous technological revolution was the Industrial Revolution. Ernst Haeckle's 1866 "Tree of Life" represents perhaps the consummate Victorian taxonomy. Menschen/Man is unequivocally at the top of the tree (Figure 2). Interestingly, the Tree worked for two opposite approaches to understanding the world, approaches which were otherwise in keen conflict: the creationists and the evolutionists. Both groups saw "Man" as the top of the tree. About how Man got there, the two factions disagreed. The evolutionists saw the development of the species over time; the creationists saw an order that remained unchanged - it was as it had been in the beginning, when established by God. In other words, though the creationists' and the evolutionists' epistemological practices - ways of knowing the world - differed, both groups shared the same episteme in the Tree: it put Man on top. Article URL: http://tekka.net/07/?Thinking Read 64 more articles from Tekka sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Cross-Column Pull-Outs     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy