Chaos and Order

This is from the Controlled Vocabulary Site

Thought you may find this interesting - conceptually as well as for some of you technically:

In a discussion thread concerning Data Modeling and Taxonomy over on 
the Taxonomy Community of Practice forum, Seth Earley shared an 
interesting blog post he made last year that is worth a look.



"In complexity, there is a sweet spot between chaos and control where 
value emerges. Too much chaos and nothing gets done. Too much control 
and there are no new solutions to problems. But what are necessary 
are mechanisms to encourage self-organization. Labels and 
classifications tell the organization what is important and allow 
people and teams to find and leverage knowledge that is created in 
one part of the organization and contribute to the overall goal or 
value creation."

http://www.earley.com/blog/the-fractal-nature-of-knowledge

So what's your take? Can tags and labels be used to allow knowledge 
to emerge from chaos?