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Leaves of knowledge
Friday, February 25, 2005
Taxonomies and Tags: From Trees to Piles of Leaves is an insightful investigation of classification systems by David Weinberger.

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The tree of knowledge was a useful metaphor from Adam's fateful bite until the advent of the computer. It's the structure of Aristotle, Linnaeus, Darwin, Descartes, and Dewey the decimal guy.



This set-up is too rigid to explain today's world. Instead of trees, look at the components of trees. Think of elements of knowledge as leaves instead of branches.



Today a leaf of knowledge may appear on many trees simultaneously. You've got your tree, I've got mine, and the computer can reshuffle the leaves any number of ways. Tags, either formally defined taxonomies or organically generated "folksonomies," are ways to distribute leaves of knowledge into piles.


As our old mechanical view of the world yields to a dynamic systems view, the boundaries between disciplines break down. The "branches of science" become less important than the interactions within the ecosystem.

This brings me back, and I'm sorry to be a broken record on this but I'm exploring myself, to the principles of our new age: Everything's connected, nothing's predictable, and we're all in the same soup.




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