2 entries tagged topicmap

Flickr and del.icio.us tags illustrate why worse is better

Recently the term 'folksonomy' has been coined to refer to the use of unstructured keywords to classify and group resources collaboratively ('resources' as in photos on Flickr and links to web sites on del.icio.us). Supposedly the experts on metadata are chagrined to discover that structured keywords, hierarchical taxonomies, and faceted metadata have been outdone by such a simple system. But this approach isn't actually all that new. Read more

Identity and Homestuck

Naturally at New Year we were talking about the philosophical problem of identity and how it manifests in (for example) rules for combining Topic Maps for topics representing identical subjects, and how there are some interesting identity shennanigans in Homestuck. Here’s three of them, plus a bonus webcomic link that (unlike Homestuck) is not 7500 pages long. Read more