A followup to a recent article I commented on. These replies are of course more thoughtful then mine. The first is from Personal InfoCloud:

This assumption that the author of the "Beneath the Metadata" makes that taxonomies are great and help people find things by providing the authoritative terms is wrong. Taxonomies are always less than perfect and most often far less than perfect for helping people find and refind information they need. But, we do need taxonomies to provide that foundation structure. We need solutions that can help the many people whose terms and vocabulary are left out of the taxonomy.

and from Joho the blog:

The physical metadata about the book—the card in the card catalog, typically—allows a few more ways of categorizing and organizing it, but more than that and the catalog gets unwieldy. The simplicity of traditional taxonomies, reflecting a single-termed Aristotelian essentialism that few current philosophers take seriously, imposes on the realm of understanding a limitation inherent in the physical realm. That simplicity is no longer required. Indeed, it gets in the way of our ability to navigate the digital domain.