Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags (17 May 2005) Now, anyone who deals with categorization for a living will tell you they can never get a perfect system. In working classification systems, success is not "Did we get the ideal arrangement?" but rather "How close did we come, and on what measures?" The idea of a perfect scheme is simply a Platonic ideal. However, I want to argue that even the ontological ideal is a mistake. Even using theoretical perfection as a measure of practical success leads to misapplication of resources. Now, to the problems of classification. Article URL: http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html Read 102 more articles from Clay Shirky sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: The Cultural Heritage Language Technologies Consortium     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy