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As shown earlier, the Semantic Web has so far been attached to classical theories
of semantics that are based on a rejection of the idea of an objective Fregean 'sense'
in favor of an approach based purely on reference. The usual critique of Fregean
sense has been that the notion of some objective yet common notion of sense is
at least cryptic and even anti-scientific. Yet with the development of collaborative
tagging systems, it seems we at long last have an organic notion of a Fregean sense
developing that is both objective and common in the form of tagging. In tagging,
for each URI a number of users attach tags to particular URIs, and this common set
of tags can be considered the Fregean sense of the URI. This technique has already
been applied to problems such as ontology mapping (Togia et al. 2010). While there
are some difficulties with this viewpoint, namely that collaborative tagging systems
usually conflate a URI with whatever web representations are accessible by that
URI (and thus violate the Semantic Web dictum to separate representations from
resources and their URIs), such conflation does not at all disqualify tagging as a
candidate for a computational theory of sense. First, one can imagine that tagging
could be applied to the associated descriptions of Semantic Web URIs, and that
these tags would then directly apply to the non-information resource of that URI.
To strike deeper, one could also hold that the entire division between Semantic Web
URIs and URIs for ordinary hypertext web-pages is fundamentally misbegotten,
with 303 redirection being a completely unnecessary HTTP roundtrip. However, it
should be also noted that while the Semantic Web has yet to reach widespread usage,
collaborative tagging systems are now part and parcel of most major web-sites, and
their use seems to be increasing rather than decreasing.
There are concrete benefits to the tagging approach compared to the Semantic
Web's traditional focus on formal ontologies. The flexibility of tagging systems
is thought to be an asset; tagging is a post-hoc categorization process, in contrast
to a pre-optimized classification process such as expert-generated taxonomies. In
defining this distinction, Jacob (2004) believes that “categorization divides the world
of experience into groups or categories whose members share some perceptible
similarity within a given context. That this context may vary and with it the
composition of the category is the very basis for both the flexibility and the power
of cognitive categorization.” Philosophically, tagging is akin to late Wittgenstein's
notion of 'family-resemblance' (Wittgenstein 1953). Classification, on the other
hand “involves the orderly and systematic assignment of each entity to one and
only one class within a system of mutually exclusive and non-overlapping classes;
it mandates consistent application of these principles within the framework of a
prescribed ordering of reality” (Jacob 2004), a tradition going back to Aristotle
(Sowa 1987). Other authors argue that tagging enables users to order and share
data more efficiently than using classification schemes; the free-association process
involved in tagging is cognitively much more simple than decisions about finding
and matching existing categories (Butterfield 2004). Additionally, proponents of
tagging systems show that users of tagging systems only need to agree on the general
meaning of a tag in order to provide shared value instead of the more difficult task
of agreeing on a specific, detailed taxonomy (Mathes 2004).
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