Reification is an ontological imperative

Reification is an ontological imperative.

I think that this might be some deep statement about the
semantic web, but it's so deep that I really don't understand it.

Reification in this sense appears to have something to do with
taking abstract concepts and making them concrete, turning
ad hoc heuristics into code, writing down a set of things into
a list so that it can be machine processed and sorted, and
otherwise taking thoughts and ideas and turning them into bits.

Ontological has to do with categories and classification, the
relationships between things, and especially how to create data
structures to represent these. In typical ontologies, the result
is some data structure that looks like a graph, often but not
necessarily a hierarchy, which puts things into buckets based
on their essential features.

If I had to reprocess this through my own experience, it would
have to do with the relationship between writing things down
and sorting through them. Fundamentally, if you are going to
take a long list of abstractions and make them concrete, you
get as a necessary side effect the ability to distinguish between
them and group them into bunches based on attributes that may
not have been explicit in the abstract conceptions of things.

To see someone else having thought through the repercussions of
this, see:

Clay Shirky, "Ontology is overrated". On tagging systems
vs. hierarchical classification, and how it's OK to have tag
collections from a bunch of people make sense of the identity
of things on the net vs. having centralized catalogers do that.

Tim Spalding on Tags: A reading and listening list, from Thing-ology.
Tim has addressed the problem of making explicit people's
information about their own books in a way that makes
collective information visible with LibraryThing, and there's
a lot more to it than just saying "tags rock!".

Ed Yourdon, "The Politics of Metrics", a talk he gave at the Software Best Practices conference in Detroit in April 2008.
When the thing to be reified is the behavior of individuals, and
the ontology that is applied is a measure of quality or success,
there are all manner of messy politics and second-order effects
that come into play.

Brian Kerr channeling Christopher Alexander:

“To seek the timeless way we first must know the quality without a number. There is a central quality which is the rooted criterion of life and the spirit of man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be numbered.”

I write this down (reification), and then Typepad insists that I add a category to it (ontological imperative). It landed in "cyberinfrastructure", this weird bag of side effects of computerizing the world.

Comments

[Prentiss Riddle]

I'm told that the way philosophers or at least cultural studies people use the word "ontology" is quite different from the way computer and information scientists do it, to the point of mutual incomprehension. In case things weren't muddled enough.

P.S. My favorite joke about the futility of taxonomy: "Ontology recapitulates philology." Nyuk nyuk nyuk.