The Semantic Web - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 50

Chapter 3
The Semantic Web
The task of classifying all the words of language, or what's the
same thing, all the ideas that seek expression, is the most
stupendous of logical tasks. Anybody but the most accomplished
logician must break down in it utterly; and even for the
strongest man, it is the severest possible tax on the logical
equipment and faculty.
Charles Sanders Peirce , letter to editor B. E. Smith of the
Century Dictionary
The Web is a universal information space, but so far it has been one composed
entirely of hypertext documents. As said by Berners-Lee at the World Wide Web
conference in 1994, “to a computer, then, the web is a flat, boring world devoid
of meaning...this is a pity, as in fact documents on the web describe real objects
and imaginary concepts, and give particular relationships between them” (1994b).
The heart of this particular insight is the realization that it is the content of the
information, not its encoding in hypertext, that is of central importance to the Web.
The purpose of the architecture of the Web is to connect information of any kind in
a decentralized manner, and this architecture can be applied beyond the hypertext
documents of its initial incarnation.
The next step in Berners-Lee's program to expand the Web beyond hypertext
is called the Semantic Web , a term first used by Foucault in The Order of Things
(Foucault 1970). The most cited definition of the Semantic Web is given by Berners-
Lee et al. as “the Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current
one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers
and people to work in cooperation” (2001). How can information be added to the
Web without encoding it in hypertext? The answer is to find a language capable of
representing the information about the aforementioned real objects and imaginary
concepts. This requires a knowledge representation language , a language whose
primary purpose is the representation of non-digital content in a digital encoding .
So instead of the Eiffel Tower, we will have a number of facts about the Eiffel Tower