ArticleRead (18): The Dark Side of the Semantic Web

The Dark Side of the Semantic Web, By James Hendler, in IEEE Intelligent Systems, 2007, Vol 22, No 1, 2-3 ; and his presentation.

The short analysis on the relationship of Semantic Web and AI research fields in observable Web 2.0 is given. The "dark side" of the Semantic Web is treated from the point of AI community that they are lack of experiences on social aspects of the Web (e.g. the use of social tagging).

Hendler emphasizes that the theme of AI – “that which looks easy in the small is often much harder in the large” . On the other hand, the catch phrase in Semantic Web – “a little semantics goes a long way” is on revealing the main trend: RDF/OWL in practice.

Two benefits for building RDF triple stores include:

1. RDF enables you to store data in a flexible schema so you can store additional types of information that you might have been unware of when you originally designed the schema.
2. RDF helps you to create Web-like relationships between data, which is not easily done in a typical relational database.

In particular, Hendler notices that the main design principle for RDF is that having unique names for different terms has a great impact on the Web. However, the challenge goes to the question of two URIs whether they are indicating the “same” , the “different”, “different parts of the same thing”, or the others.

ArticleRead (10): Patterns of Information Search and Access on the World Wide Web

Patterns of Information Search and Access on the World Wide Web: Democratizing Expertise or Creating New Hierarchies? By Alexandre Caldas, Ralph Schroeder, Gustavo S. Mesch, William H. Dutton, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2008) 769–793

The patterns of information search and access are found to have no power law distribution on the Web scale, but this result is not consisted in the case of small clusters of expertise within a narrower scale. There are three propositions of arguments on what patterns of access to information over the Web: Power Law (winner-take-all); Non Power Law (egalitarian effect of search engines); Benkler’ complex interpretation (The Wealth of Network).

To investigate the extent that the use of alternative search technologies decentralizes access to scientific knowledge, Caldas et al (2008) focus on quantitative methods for analysing the Web in terms of the structure of hyperlinks among Web resources. Together with the qualitative interviewing approach, they test two hypothesis: (1) different search engines result in different outcomes; and (2) centrality, connectivity and subgroup structure can be used to identify regularities and patterns of the Web.

Two hypothesis have been tested positively on the Web scale through comparing six main search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSNSearch, AskJeeves, Gigablast, and ScholarGoogle) with a set of three keywords for each six global topics (climate change, poverty, HIV/AIDS, terrorism, trade reform, and Internet and society). Regularities of results in Web Networks show that the average distance among reachable pairs is small, and the density within link blocks is relatively low. Therefore, they view this fragmented nature of these Web network as the evidence of “democratization” of the Web. Moreover, the significant clustering process, which defines a clique as a subset of the network with at least 3 nodes interlinked, is the main reasoning for the “reinforcement (clique) effects and not the power law effect.

ArticleRead (1): The pragmatic web: a manifesto

The pragmatic web: a manifesto, By Mareike Schoop, Aldo de Moor, and Jan L.G. Dietz, Communications of the ACM, May 2006 Vol.49, No.5

This article is composed of 7 paragraphs. From a context driven perspective, the authors support some preliminary thoughts of Pragmatic Web of Munindar Singh (2002). A similar sense of pragmatics in essential issues of context-based, community as well as collaboration structure has advanced two International Conferences on the Pragmatic Web with this Manifesto in 2006 and 2007, and is supposed to be further advanced at the 3rd Conference in Uppsala, Sweden, 2008.

In the first place, the article starts with existing Semantic Web problems such as complex format of RDF and ontology, as well as the insufficient context-free assumption which may not satisfy Web functions in communication, consensus building, and cooperatively modifying ontologies. It then shifts towards the crucial challenge of how to build a socio-technical infrastructure to leverage the Web from Semantics to Pragmatics.

In particular, authors are devoted to the concept which ontologies co-evolve with their communities of use, and within conversation between communities in practice. Thus, the aim of Pragmatic Web is to increase human collaboration effectively by proper technologies. Some proposals for the implementation of this Pragmatic Vision has been drawn on, for instance, building systems :
(1) for ontology negotiation
(2) for ontology-based business interaction
(3) for pragmatic ontology building efforts in communities of practice, in other words, for goal-oriented discourses in communities.
This is maybe the strongest part of the article, and it was later then the most cited Pragmatic Vision for scholars of interests.

It is somewhat, however, not clear that the conclusion part brought out a theoretical foundation in the language-action perspective as an analysis approach for the Pragmatic Web. By contrast, Singh (2002) did go back to the original pragmatic scholarship for its foundations of the theory of Signs by Charles Morris. However, it is not possible to do justice to whether the importance of Sign theory (Semiotics) should be or should not be in the Pragmatic Web research agenda in only one sentence or one paragraph. Instead, the pragmatic research should draw attentions to questions such as: how the Semiotic School find a place for the Web Science, and how the Web Science Community re-negotiate and collaborate with the Semiotic communities to work out the definition of Pragmatic Web in practice.