"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.