SIOC Post profile for "AI3:::Adaptive Information"
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primary topic: Give Me a Sign: What Do Things Mean on the Semantic Web?
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Give Me a Sign: What Do Things Mean on the Semantic Web?
type: Post
has container: weblog
has creator: Mike Bergman
maker: Mike Bergman
created: 2012-01-24T15:52:16Z
content: Coca-Cola, Toucans and Charles Sanders Peirce Download PDF The crowning achievement of the semantc Web is the simple use of URIs to identify data. Further, if the URI identifier can resolve to a representation of that data, it now becomes an integral part of the HTTP access protocol of the Web while providing a unique identifier for the data. These innovations provide the basis for distributed data at global scale, all accessible via Web devices such as browsers and smartphones that are now a ubiquitous part of our daily lives. Yet, despite these profound and simple innovations, the semantic Web's designers and early practitioners and advocates have been mired in a muddled, metaphysical argument of at least a decade over what these URIs mean, what they reference, and what their actual true identity is. These muddles about naming and identity, it might be argued, are due to computer scientists and programmers trying to grapple with issues more properly the domain of philosophers and linguists. But that would be unfair. For philosophers and linguists themselves have for centuries also grappled with these same conundrums [1]. As I argue in this piece, part of the muddle results from attempting to do too much with URIs while another part results from not doing enough. I am also not trying to directly enter the fray of current standards deliberations. (Despite a decade of controversy, I optimistically believe that the messy process of argument and consensus building will work itself out [2].) What I am trying to do in this piece, however, is to look to one of America's pre-eminent philosophers and logicians, Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced "purse"), to inform how these controversies of naming, identity and meaning may be dissected and resolved. 'Identity Crisis', httpRange-14, and Issue 57 The Web began as a way to hyperlink between documents, generally Web pages expressed in the HTML markup language. These initial links were called URLs (uniform resource locators), a…
encoded: Coca-Cola, Toucans and Charles Sanders Peirce Download PDF The crowning achievement of the semantc Web is the simple use of URIs to identify data. Further, if the URI identifier can resolve to a representation of that data, it now becomes an integral part of the HTTP access protocol of the Web while providing a unique identifier for the data. These innovations provide the basis for distributed data at global scale, all accessible via Web devices such as browsers and smartphones that are now a ubiquitous part of our daily lives. Yet, despite these profound and simple innovations, the semantic Web’s designers and early practitioners and advocates have been mired in a muddled, metaphysical argument of at least a decade over what these URIs mean, what they reference, and what their actual true identity is. These muddles about naming and identity, it might be argued, are due to computer scientists and programmers trying to grapple with issues more properly the domain of philosophers and linguists. But that would be unfair. For philosophers and linguists themselves have for centuries also grappled with these same conundrums [1]. As I argue in this piece, part of the muddle results from attempting to do too much with URIs while another part results from not doing enough. I am also not trying to directly enter the fray of current standards deliberations. (Despite a decade of controversy, I optimistically believe that the messy process of argument and consensus building will work itself out [2].) What I am trying to do in this piece, however, is to look to one of America’s pre-eminent philosophers and logicians, Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced “purse”), to inform how these controversies of naming, identity and meaning may be dissected and resolved. ‘Identity Crisis’, httpRange-14, and Issue 57 The Web began as a way to hyperlink between documents, generally Web pages expressed in the HTML markup language. These initial links were called URLs (uniform resource locators), a…
topic: Adaptive Information
topic: Charles Sanders Peirce
topic: Linked Data
topic: Peircean Principles
topic: Semantic Web
has reply: comment-149051
has reply: comment-149845
has reply: comment-151079
has reply: comment-157282
has reply: comment-221409
links to: Download PDF
links to: semantc Web
links to: URIs
links to: HTTP
links to: [1]
links to: [2]
links to: Charles Sanders Peirce
links to: URLs
links to: [3]
links to: [4]
links to: World Wide Web Consortium
links to: [5]
links to: TAG
links to: httpRange-14
links to: [6]
links to: Tim Berners-Lee
links to: [7]
links to: [19]
links to: [8]
links to: Issue 57
links to: linked data
links to: [9]
links to: [10]
links to: [11]
links to: [12]
links to: [13]
links to: [14]
links to: [15]
links to: [16]
links to: unclear semantics
links to: muddled guidelines
links to: [17]
links to: name
links to: Coca-Cola,
links to: beverage
links to: The Gods, They Must be Crazy
links to: [18]
links to: company web site
links to: Wikipedia
links to: company description page
links to: heritage page
links to: bitly
links to: xnbA6
links to: 9ojUpL
links to: referent
links to: image
links to: description of the toucan
links to: toucan
links to: keel-billed toucan
links to: full list of toucan species
links to: [20]
links to: Frege
links to: predicate calculus
links to: description logics
links to: RDF
links to: OWL
links to: pragmatism
links to: existential graphs
links to: model theory
links to: semiotics
links to: [21]
links to: syntactics
links to: semantics

Mike Bergman
type: User

Mike Bergman
type: Person

beverage
label: description
label: Coke beverage

description of the toucan
label: definitive description of "toucan"

Frege
label: Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege

semiotics
label: semiotics.

pragmatics

[22]

Moby-Dick

Meaning Triangle

[23]

semiosis

Aristotle

Rudolf Carnap

René Descartes

Kurt Gödel

David Hume

Immanuel Kant

Saul Kripke

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Richard Montague

Willard Van Orman Quine

Bertrand Russell

Ferdinand de Saussure

John Rogers Searle

Alfred Tarski

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein

Umberto Eco

What Do HTTP URIs Identify?

URNs

Disambiguating RDF Identifiers.

httpRange-14 Webography

Is 303
label: eally Necessary?

URI Identity and Web Architecture Revisited

Guide to ISSUE-57 (httpRange-14) document suite

Wikipedia listing

thread