Making Digital Durable

Making Digital Durable is a video on what time does to categories. The presenter is Clay Shirky. The video is long and the recording is pretty bad (at the end there's even a long blank section while changing tapes), but the message is interesting.

The gist of it is that no matter how you choose to describe and structure you data, at some point in time this will be wrong and it will stay wrong. A possible solution for this is to look for alternatives to pre-defined taxonomies, such as tagging systems, as a means for data structuring, to see whether they are more resilient to change.

Of course there are other views and opinions to complement the one argued for in the video. A fine example can be found at http://tomgruber.org/writing/ontology-of-folksonomy.htm where Tom Gruber (one of those responsible for popularizing "ontology" as an important concept in Computer Science) lay down his arguments.

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