Group items tagged

"The semantic web proposes to inject machine meaningful data into the existing human language oriented web. As part of this effort, on the semantic web, URIs are used to identify entities. But there is currently no standard way to specify what it is that any given URI is to identify, or to whom, or when. Recent work in linguistics offers ideas for a solution to this lack. It focuses on the pragmatics of actual language use among ensembles of people. Also, the World Wide Web provides a set of technologies, in the form of socially constructed web sites, that could be employed to provide a solution. In this paper, I suggest how such socially constructed web sites could be used to address the problem of establishing common ground among a community of machines of the referent of a URI used on the semantic web. The result is a proposal to automate social meaning by creating societies of machines that share knowledge representations identified by URIs."

What tagging does point to convincingly is the social aspect of naming. In a given natural language, many sorts of identifiers, such as common words, are socially centralized. Other sorts of identifiers, such as proper names, are socially decentralized, varying from local context to local context. Black has noticed a correspondence between this socially grounded identification process and the use of socially constructed Web sites.

reducing black carbon is one of a number of relatively quick and simple climate fixes using existing technologies