Prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies

Re:Prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies by charlysl on Saturday April 11, 2020 @12:11PM (#22842386)

I meant hierarchy in the sense of systems built of subsystems, which, in turn, are built of other subsystems, and so on. More like composition. And each subsystem often represents a different, more elementary, level of abstraction.

But, if I understand it correctly, nominal hierarchies can also scale really well, like DNS addresses.

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Re:Prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies by taeric on Saturday April 11, 2020 @12:19PM (#22842437)

Dns is a hierarchical mapping into a different, not necessarily similar hierarchical mapping. So, I think it strengthens both of our cases.

My point is imagine if the network had to only have the organization that is present in dns names.

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Re:Prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies by heavenlyblue on Saturday April 11, 2020 @12:31PM (#22842493)

DNS only has two levels practically. And technically if you go more than one level you’re probably getting a reply from the same second-level system.

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Re:Prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies by toast0 on Saturday April 11, 2020 @04:02PM (#22843810)

I count at least three levels for most domains.

Root, TLD, domain holder, sometimes further delegation depending on the domain holder.

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Re:Prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies by heavenlyblue on Sunday April 12, 2020 @05:32AM (#22847014)

Except you don’t do all of these three requests, you just access your hoster’s DNS server which already had this cached most probably and returns it.

For most of the cases, you will never be hitting root at all.

If the system was as hierarchical as it was proposed in the parent it would never be stable enough to work due to a single point of failure at root.

Ergo, hierarchies are not natural.

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