Weinberger and Shirky on Ontology

Knowledge has, for many generations, been represented as a hierarchy. There are categories (Math, Science, Humanities) and sub-categories (Algebra, Chemistry, Literature), and, theoretically, they encompass all human knowledge. Whether this is true or not is not an important question in Weinberger's "Taxonomies and Tags" and Shirky's "Ontology is overrated". Instead, both authors focus on new perspectives of knowledge brought about by the advent of the read/write web. Specifically, they focus on mass user-generated organization of information in the form of tags.