From the ontological-hysterical archives

WiReD 4.05 (May ’96), “Seek and Ye Shall Find (Maybe),” on Yahoo[!]:

Starting with the ad hoc categories she inherited from Yang and Filo, Srinivasan began slowly and deliberately steering Yahoo!’s ontology toward completeness. Mainly, it’s been a matter of adding new categories and reorganizing hierarchies as the Web evolves from containing only specialized, technical information to containing content from every field of knowledge. But she’s also set up certain guidelines to ensure consistency. For example, every regional Web site is now put in the regional hierarchy, and a cross-link to the site is placed under the appropriate topic. So a Florida real estate company is listed under Florida, with a cross-link from real estate.

A few months ago, Srinivasan told me, she was adding categories and making changes to the ontology almost every day. Now major adjustments are becoming much more infrequent. She pointed to this as support for Yang’s assertion that “at some point, our scheme will become relatively stable. We will have captured the breadth of human knowledge.”

A cross-linked Florida real estate company.