I wrote the current issue of Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0 newsletter, a looong piece on taxonomies and tagging. Esther has given me permission to post the introduction to the article. It attempts to give an overview of taxonomies, trees, faceted classification, tags and folksonomies. Here’s how it begins:

The narrative that tells of the first man and woman encountering the tree of knowledge focuses on its tempting fruit. But after we took the bite, we apparently looked up and got the idea that knowledge is shaped like the tree’s branching structure: Big concepts contain smaller ones that contain smaller ones yet. Over the millennia, we have fashioned the structures of knowledge in just such tree-like ways, from the departmental organization of universities (liberal arts contains history and history contains ancient Chinese history) to the hierarchy of species. The idea that knowledge is shaped like a tree is perhaps our oldest knowledge about knowledge.

Now autumn has come to the forest of knowledge, thanks to the digital revolution. The leaves are falling and the trees are looking bare. We are discovering that traditional knowledge hierarchies that have served us so well are unnecessarily restricted when it comes to organizing information in the digital world. The principles of organization themselves are changing now that they are being freed from the constraints of the physical world. For example …

Click here to read the rest of the introductory section… [Technorati tags: taxonomy tags folksonomy ]

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