Architecture of theWorld WideWeb - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 24

Source Message Receiver

realizes

interprets to

interprets to

Encoding

Content

Fig. 2.3 Information, encoding, content

These terms are all illustrated in Fig. 2.3 . A source is sending a receiver a
message. The information-bearing message realizes some particular encoding such
as a few sentences in English and a picture of the Eiffel Tower, and the content of
the message can be interpreted to be about the Eiffel Tower.
The encoding and content of information do not in general come in self-contained
bundles, with each encoding being interpreted to some free-standing propositional
content. Instead, encodingevs and content come in entire interlocking informational
systems. One feature of these systems is that encodings are layered inside of each
other and content is also layered upon other content. The perfect example would be
an English sentence in an e-mail message, where a series of bits are used to encode
the letters of the alphabet, and the alphabet is then used to encode words. Likewise,
the content of a sentence may depend on the content of the words in the sentence.
When this happens, one is no longer dealing with a simple message, but some form
of language. A language can be defined as a system in which information is related
to other information systematically . In a language, this is a relationship between
how the encoding of some information can change the interpretation of other
encodings. Messages always have encodings, and usually these encodings are part of
languages. To be more brief, information is encoded in languages. The relationships
between encodings and content are usually taken to be based on some form of (not
necessarily formalizable or even understood) rules. If one is referring to asystem
in which the encoding of information is related to each other systematically ,then
one is talking about the syntax of a language. If one is referring to asystemin
which the content of information is related to each other systematically , then one
is referring to the semantics of the language.The lower-level of a language can be
terms , regularities in marks , that may or may not have their own interpretation,
such as the words or alphabet. Any combination of terms that is valid according to
the language's syntax is a sentence (sometimes an 'expression') in the language,
and any combination of terms that has an interpretation to content according to the
language's semantics is a statement in the language.