The Phaneron

Cookbooks are a tradition in software and mashups are all the rage today, so I couldn’t resist starting a mashup cookbook. But, before I show some of my recipes and what I have in the oven, I thought I’d explain the role mashups and social production play in solving a problem too hard and too expensive to solve under conditions controlled by corporations or the government. An issue we face today is producing a sufficiently complex mirrror world to match the needs of an information society.

The central topic for this post is to sketch out a program for developing a new theory of meaning. In short, my hypothesis is this: a) semantics provides a theory of representation and truth; b) semiotics provides a theory signs and their interpretation; c) pragmaticism defines the effect of a conception on other objects as the whole of the conception; and d) meaning emerges in a complex system through the convergence of relational properties and domain knowledge.

Danny Ayers made a request for comments on the state of the semantic web a few weeks ago. I’ll preface this post by saying the state of the semantic web is very good by which I mean some very good design decisions were made early on that ensured a vibrant academic research base, a broad marketplace for technology transfer and an eager community of technology providers to realize the vision of a web of meaning. I’m personally very positive overall on the state of the semantic web. The semantic web is now pretty close to the best of all possible worlds. (ha, ha, ha) All that being said it’s time to sharpen my pencil a bit and offer a critique on a few of the finer points of the state of the semantic web: representation and realism.