Category Archives: Social software

Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags

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I thought Clay Shirky’s Spring 2005 article of this name () was worth reading, if only to come to this choice section:

“It comes down ultimately to a question of philosophy. Does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world? If you believe the world makes sense, then anyone who tries to make sense of the world differently than you is presenting you with a situation that needs to be reconciled formally, because if you get it wrong, you’re getting it wrong about the real world.

“If, on the other hand, you believe that we make sense of the world, if we are, from a bunch of different points of view, applying some kind of sense to the world, then you don’t privilege one top level of sense-making over the other. What you do instead is you try to find ways that the individual sense-making can roll up to something which is of value in aggregate, but you do it without an ontological goal. You do it without a goal of explicitly getting to or even closely matching some theoretically perfect view of the world.”

And now Microsoft

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Well just as I’m busy working on a brief for my cousin James on the shift handover idea I see at the other end of the innovation specturm Microsoft has recently acquired Azyxxi. And as Bill Crounse, Healthcare Industry Director at MS posts in his ‘Health blog on 10’ on 26 July:


“The Azyxxi solution came about, as most good things do, out of sheer frustration.  One of the physician developers told me his hospital had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on clinical systems the doctors working there couldn’t or wouldn’t use.  Using commodity software and the latest technologies from Microsoft, they built a solution that aggregates clinical information from all the disparate systems in use..Furthermore, the solution opens up ways to take advantage of the information worker tools, and communication and collaboration technologies our company is famous for.  Frankly, I sometimes think better solutions to facilitate communication and collaboration in healthcare are perhaps more important to the industry and to patient safety than tools that simply help us assimilate and document patient information.”

Very interesting. Nicely, his blog includes one comment which ends with the words: “Good luck – the guys at NHS in the UK really need to talk to you about this…”. I guess I better get on with my own weblog based idea pronto.