Seeing Forests

We’re in the midst of loading open source data sets like those from Factual and cross-referencing them to other data sets. This cross-referencing involves equating different “taxonomies” in different data sets to one another (amongst other things). I put taxonomies in quotes since, alas, creating taxonomies seems to be a dying art. What are called taxonomies are invariably just hierarchies of generally related concepts that might be useful in some browsing capacity or in some deductive computation but in reality are useful in neither. Since many people think that the actual end of human memory arrived with the initial introduction of Google Search, there seems to be really no need to organize information anymore. We can all just outsource that to Google and search for it later. No need to organize and discriminate one kind of business from another. Except, of course, when it comes to bars. We all desperately need to know whether it’s a “Dive Bar”, a “Hookah Bar”, or an “Oxygen Bar”. The “Restaurant” category should be just fine for all of those places people eat that aren’t “Fast Food”, “Bagels”, or “Internet Cafes”. But we have to get more detail on our Bars. Just seems to be that 20-somethings are designing these categories and are projecting the subjective over the objective. (I’m not actually talking about Factual’s hierarchy here, sort of.)

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