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Abstract

Today's semantic web deals with meaning in a very restricted sense and offers static solutions. This is adequate for many scientific, technical purposes and for business transactions requiring machine-to-machine communication, but does not answer the needs of culture. Science, technology and business are concerned primarily with the latest findings, the state of the art, i.e. the paradigm or dominant world-view of the day. In this context, history is considered non-essential because it deals with things that are out of date. By contrast, culture faces a much larger challenge, namely, to re-present changes in ways of knowing; changing meanings in different places at a given time (synchronically) and over time (diachronically). Culture is about both objects and the commentaries on them; about a cumulative body of knowledge; about collective memory and heritage. Here, history plays a central role and older does not mean less important or less relevant. Hence, a Leonardo painting that is 400 years old, or a Greek statue that is 2500 years old, typically have richer commentaries and are often more valuable than their contemporary equivalents. In this context, the science of meaning (semantics) is necessarily much more complex than semantic primitives. A semantic web in the cultural domain must enable us to trace how meaning and knowledge organisation have evolved historically in different cultures. This paper examines five issues to address this challenge: 1) different world-views (i.e. a shift from substance to function and from ontology to multiple ontologies); 2) developments in definitions and meaning; 3) distinctions between words and concepts; 4) new classes of relations; and 5) dynamic models of knowledge organisation. These issues reveal that historical dimensions of cultural diversity in knowledge organisation are also central to classification of biological diversity. New ways are proposed of visualizing knowledge using a time/space horizon to distinguish between universals and particulars. It is suggested that new visualization methods make possible a history of questions as well as of answers, thus enabling dynamic access to cultural and historical dimensions of knowledge. Unlike earlier media, which were limited to recording factual dimensions of collective memory, digital media enable us to explore theories, ways of perceiving, ways of knowing; to enter into other mindsets and world-views and thus to attain novel insights and new levels of tolerance. Some practical consequences are outlined.

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Abstract

At VVWW-7 (Brisbane, 1997), Tim Berners-Lee outlined his vision of a global reasoning web. At VVWW- 8 (Toronto, May 1998), he developed this into a vision of a semantic web, where one Gould search not just for isolated words, but for meaning in the form of logically provable claims. In the past four years this vision has spread with amazing speed. The semantic web has been adopted by the European Commission as one of the important goals of the Sixth Framework Programme. In the United States it has become linked with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). While this quest to achieve a semantic web is new, the quest for meaning in language has a history that is almost as old as language itself. Accordingly this paper opens with a survey of the historical background. The contributions of the Dublin Core are reviewed briefly. To achieve a semantic web requires both syntactic and semantic interoperability. These challenges are outlined. A basic contention of this paper is that semantic interoperability requires much more than a simple agreement concerning the static meaning of a term. Different levels of agreement (local, regional, national and international) are involved and these levels have their own history. Hence, one of the larger challenges is to create new systems of knowledge organization, which identify and connect these different levels. With respect to meaning or semantics, early twentieth century pioneers such as Wüster were hopeful that it might be sufficient to limit oneself to isolated terms and words without reference to the larger grammatical context: to concept systems rather than to propositional logic. While a fascination with concept systems implicitly dominates many contemporary discussions, this paper suggests why this approach is not sufficient. The final section of this paper explores how an approach using propositional logic could lead to a new approach to universals and particulars. This points to a re-organization of knowledge, and opens the way for a vision of a semantic web with all the historical and cultural richness and complexity of language itself.

Footnote

Initially written for Dublin Core Meeting in 2000 which rejected the article.