Ontology....a 300 year old hack?

According to Clay Shirky, ontology is nearing the end of its useful life. Now, I've only read the program description of a presentation called "Ontology is Overrated: Links, Tags, and Post-hoc Metadata" he made on March 16 at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. But, I think you'll agree that even the description is packed with more than a few interesting and challenging notions for librarians, including this "the Library of Congress's classification scheme exists not because concepts require consistent hierarchical placement, but because books do."

I'll bet there were either none or very few librarians in the audience at this talk so it's fascinating to me that a talk every librarian should listen to was presented to people outside our field. Wonder if we can find a place for him to talk about his ideas to librarians? I wonder if he's made such a talk at LC...I know he's been doing some consulting to LC.

And when you've read the description of the Shirkey presentation, check out the other speakers at the Etech conference. A rather distinguished set of people. I really wish I'd attended...as a community, we should be present at these kinds of conferences. We talk among ourselves too much.

Thanks to The Long Tail for the link.

I had a lovely 3 day vacation here, and met some very interesting people. I have a story to tell as soon as I get permission from the storyteller.