Social Semantics - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 195

of language, as a language exists as a mechanism for co-ordination among multiple
agents, then the meaning of an URI is the use of the URI by a community of agents,
a use that can be traced by the computational sense of the URI ranging across
tags, queries, and whatever representations are hosted at the URI . As information
retrieval is only one kind of interaction with the Web, attaching the Semantic Web
to more rich Web-mediated social interaction is exactly what is necessary to create
a third-generation Semantic Web based on lived social interactions and dynamic
ontologies. The use of a robust computational notion of sense should be able to
automatically identify resources across multiple URIs in order to deliver timely
information to users as needed, and so eventually create dynamic ontologies that
respond in real-time to new information needs. Tagging systems show how this is
already organically happening, and our initial results with search show how this
process can be extended.
In contrast to Wilk's interpretation of Wittgenstein and computational linguistics
(Wilks 2008b), we do not hold that either sense or a wider notion of meaning can
be accounted for by some 'mental' lexicon or even massive statistics on word-use
on the Web, although the latter would certainly play a role as a computational trace
of a sense. Taking the role of embodiment and the world seriously, it would be
a mistake to separate language from the world and the actions of agents therein.
Therefore, natural language processing itself is not a firm foundation for semantics
on the Web. On the contrary, it is crucial to attach the use of words and meaning
to particular embodied language-games, like the use of search engines. After all,
to use words to retrieve web-pages is vastly different than using words in dialogue
with another human. Many of the characteristics of terms typed into search engines
or tagging systems, such as their extreme brevity, will have no clear analogue to
natural language use. The open-ended innovative use of language on the Web makes
the creation of finite lexicons difficult if not impossible.
The most revolutionary concept of Wittgenstein is the form-of-life ,and
everything else in his philosophy flows from this. The key to understanding the
form-of-life is that the meaning of a word is not just in other words, but in the entire
activity of the agents that share the language that uses the word. If the Semantic
Web is to succeed, it must take into account not only natural language, but the
real activity of users on the Web, in order to base a new language-game upon this
form of life. Currently, the primary approach is to build Semantic Web ontologies
direct from the text in web-pages in natural language (Brewster et al. 2007). We
should notice that there is a particular use of natural language on the Web that is
hegemonic: the searching for information by using brief natural language keywords.
While this is far from the only use of the Web, it is by far the most dominant, as
shown by various studies of user behavior on the Web (Batelle 2003). This constant
and near obsessive use of Web search engines is the de-facto cybernetic form of life
on the Web. So, any attempt to 'boot-strap' a new language-game for the Semantic
Web will have to take into account that the search for information via keywords and
social networks is fundamental for the Web, a point routinely ignored by both the
direct reference and the logicist positions.