Taksonomia - Gmail, Technorati, WinFS - cogitating reticulation

Gmail, Technorati, WinFS - cogitating reticulation ITworld.com, Ebusiness in the Enterprise 3/9/05

Sean McGrath, ITworld.com

I am ever-so-slightly synesthetic[1] when it comes to words. Take the word 'reticulation', for example. I recently added this one to my vocabulary. In my mind's eye, the word appears as a square sheet of aluminum, folded into origami patterns, painted the color of hubris, smelling of harpsichord and humming like magenta.
Actually, no, it doesn't. I made that up. Making up silly definitions of words helps me to stop forgetting them. I do not want to forget what 'reticulation' means. It is too useful a word to forget. Besides, this article could not exist without it.

Pull up a chair and I'll tell you what happened. It all started when I made a comment on my blog[2] to the effect that hierarchies are things we cannot think within, but equally cannot think without. I am not quite sure what it means but it sounded good at the time.

A fellow blogger, Hamish Harvery[3] linked to my blog and recommended Arthur Koestler's book 'The Ghost in the Machine'. I have not read it yet but I understand that it talks about social structures. It talks about how we create organizational hierarchies (arborization) and then join these hierarchies together into complex organizational networks (reticulation).

What on Earth am I talking about? Sit back down on that chair and I'll tell you. I am talking about digital information and how it is organized. I am talking about how we humans manage to navigate the infinite seas of digital information without our heads exploding.

Here is how we do it. If your head works the way most people's heads work, your first port of call in organizing raw information of any form is to put it into a hierarchy. There comes a point however, where you find that hierarchies are not enough to capture the rich structure of information. You start to join bits of hierarchies to each other in complex ways. As information hierarchies mature, they have a way of ceasing to be pure hierarchies. Arborization turns to reticulation.

We humans have been doing arborization for a long, long time. From the Dewey Decimal Classification system to Taxonomies of living things. We humans take to hierarchies like fish take to water. They combine great power with great simplicity. It helps greatly that hierarchies map naturally to the physical world of words on pieces of paper. Hierarchies have a natural ally in paper books as they can be linearized into a sequence of pages. If you have ever looked at a table of contents (say 'yes') then you know what I mean.

We humans have also been doing reticulation for a long time. However, it historically has been a more challenging information management technique as it does not map to the physical world of paper very easily. Even simple forms of reticulation like cross references are a pain in the real world. Anybody who has ever tried to read a piece of legislation and found themselves with a dozen separate books on their desk for following the complex cross-referencing knows what I mean.

Then, the web happened. A better incubator for reticulation techniques is hard to imagine. Hypertext subverts hierarchy. Actually, no. I don't think it does. I think hypertext supplements hierarchy with a basic form of reticulation.

Finally, I am getting to the piece you want to read. Interesting forms of reticulation are popping up everywhere these days. It is as if hypertext is now part of our collective consciousness and we have lost any fear of it. We are happy to use it as a base for more powerful forms of information management.

What on Earth am I talking about? Sit back down on that chair one more time and I'll tell you. I'm talking about the label system in GMail[4]. Have you seen how that works? There is no great big folder system to speak of. The folders in GMail are created on-the-fly based on the labels you attach to individual e-mails. You are no longer restricted to putting an e-mail in one place and one place only. You are no longer restricted to a hierarchical filing structure. The time honored metaphors of the filing cabinet and the shelf are no longer helpful.

I'm also talking about the faceted classification in WinFS[5]. Think of the way you organize files on a file system. Now, instead of thinking about fixing the names of folders and picking one folder to put your file in, think about that file being, effectively, in as many folders as you like, all at the same time. Last but not least, I'm talking about the emergence of Folksonomies[6] and the intriguing Technorati tagging system[7].

GMail, WinFS, Technorati, all these developments are reticulations of one form or another. It is as if overnight, the world has woken up to the power of it all. (In reality, it is I that has woken up to the power of it all.).

Metadata enthusiasts the world over must be shaking their heads in disbelief. Finally, it's happening - that's great! However, it is not really happening the way the metadata enthusiasts (or theorists) would have predicted. Welcome to the World Wide Web where the only thing that is completely predictable is its total unpredictability.
[1] http://www.apa.org/monitor/mar01/synesthesia.html
[2] http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com/archives/
[3] http://weblog.hamishharvey.com/mishmash/2005/01/on_hierarchy.html
[4] http://www.beelerspace.com/index.php?p=806
[5] http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/04/01/WinFS/default.aspx
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy
[7] http://www.technorati.com/tag/