Tagging and Ontologies

When I encountered the online tagging of data (first on del.icio.us, then on LJ) it really brought brought it home to me that most ontologies do not fit into heirarchies or simple groups. When it comes to most of the things we deal with in day to day life, what we actually have are interlocking sets of observations and categorisations that are best described using a series of independent labels.

However, I think the _next_ stage is going to be the really tricky (and interesting) bit - some of the labels can themselves be part of heirarchies, or synonyms for other labels. I have no wish, for instance, to tag something as being a "short film" and a "film", when short films _are_ films. But current tagging technology doesn't allow me to set up that link. Nor does it allow me to say that things tagged with "humor" by Americans are equivalent to things tagged as "humour" by brits. What we currently have is a way to produce a mish-mash of data, with some interesting trends in it. The ability to construct thing from it will make it a lot more powerful.

A pit of depravity and terror

If you want to see a truly terrifying picture from Alton Towers then click here. Just don't say you weren't warned.

Edit: Three people have asked me if this is real. I mean, can you _see_ any evidence of photoshopping or similar? Yes, it's real. Damn sexy too.