Interesting examples, terrible argument! No substantiated claims whatsoever! Shirky obviously thinks he is pretty smart and does not have to produce any real arguments based on evidence.
Hand-Crafting My FOAF
While at eTech, I attended a number of "social software" sessions. One thing I heard was a persistent call from folk like Marc Canter for all the vendors to support something called FOAF. FOAF is a standard for "Friend of a Friend" files, and is an attempt to make machine readable information about people, groups, companies, and other online resources. In particular, it is focused on representing the information that you might typically put on your personal home page in a form such that meta-data tools can interpret it.
"They are built to be human-usable (...) are targeted primarily for storage/retrieval of personal information and serendipitous discovery of group information . (...) The development communities for each are abuzz with ideas for exploiting the structure"
The term “Semiformal Ontology” refers to a ontology which has a few bits of formality but is largely informal. It is the analog of what Tom Malone calls semi structured data, such as email or office forms. A semiformal ontology could support techn
This piece is based on two talks I gave in the spring of 2005 -- one at the O'Reilly ETech conference in March, entitled "Ontology Is Overrated", and one at the IMCExpo in April entitled "Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification." Th
SIMILE is focused on developing robust, open source tools based on Semantic Web technologies that improve access, management and reuse among digital assets.
OntoSelect monitors the web to provide an access point for ontologies on any possible topic or domain that is automatically updated, organized in a meaningful way and with support for ontology search and selection. Selected ontologies may be used for ins