The Semantic Web: Apotheosis of annotation, but what are its semantics?

This article discusses what kind of entity the proposed Semantic Web (SW) is, principally by reference to the relationship of natural language structure to knowledge representation (KR). There are three distinct views on this issue. The first is that the SW is basically a renaming of the traditional AI KR task, with all its problems and challenges. The second view is that the SW will be, at a minimum, the World Wide Web with its constituent documents annotated so as to yield their content, or meaning structure, more directly. This view makes natural language processing central as the procedural bridge from texts to KR, usually via some form of automated information extraction. The third view is that the SW is about trusted databases as the foundation of a system of Web processes and services. There's also a fourth view, which is much more difficult to define and discuss: If the SW just keeps moving as an engineering development and is lucky, then real problems won't arise. This article is part of a special issue called Semantic Web Update

Sense and reference on the web

This thesis builds a foundation for the philosophy of theWeb by examining the crucial question: What does a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) mean? Does it have a sense, and can it refer to things? A philosophical and historical introduction to the Web explains the primary purpose of theWeb as a universal information space for naming and accessing information via URIs. A terminology, based on distinctions in philosophy, is employed to define precisely what is meant by information, language, representation, and reference. These terms are then employed to create a foundational ontology and principles ofWeb architecture. From this perspective, the SemanticWeb is then viewed as the application of the principles of Web architecture to knowledge representation. However, the classical philosophical problems of sense and reference that have been the source of debate within the philosophy of language return. Three main positions are inspected: the logicist position, as exemplified by the descriptivist theory of reference and the first-generation SemanticWeb, the direct reference position, as exemplified by Putnamand Kripke’s causal theory of reference and the second-generation Linked Data initiative, and a Wittgensteinian position that views the Semantic Web as yet another public language. After identifying the public language position as the most promising, a solution of using people’s everyday use of search engines as relevance feedback is proposed as a Wittgensteinian way to determine sense of URIs. This solution is then evaluated on a sample of the Semantic Web discovered by via using queries from a hypertext search engine query log. The results are evaluated and the technique of using relevance feedback from hypertext Web searches to determine relevant Semantic Web URIs in response to user queries is shown to considerably improve baseline performance. Future work for the Web that follows from our argument and experiments is detailed, and outlines of a future philosophy of the Web laid out