title: Peirce, meaning and the semantic web

authors: Legg, Catherine

subjects: pragmatism

abstract: The so-called ‘Semantic Web’ is phase II of Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision for the WWW, whereby resources would no longer be indexed merely ‘syntactically’, via opaque character-strings, but via their meanings. We argue that one roadblock to Semantic Web development has been researchers’ adherence to a Cartesian, ‘private’ account of meaning, which has been dominant for the last 400 years, and which understands the meanings of signs as what their producers intend them to mean. It thus strives to build ‘silos of meaning’ which explicitly and antecedently determine what signs on the Web will mean in all possible situations. By contrast, the field is moving forward insofar as it embraces Peirce’s ‘public’, evolutionary account of meaning, according to which the meaning of signs just is the way they are interpreted and used to produce further signs. Given the extreme interconnectivity of the Web, it is argued that silos of meaning are unnecessary as plentiful machine-understandable data about the meaning of Web resources exists already in the form of those resources themselves, for applications that are able to leverage it, and it is Peirce’s account of meaning which can best make sense of the recent explosion in ‘user-defined content’ on the Web, and its relevance to achieving Semantic Web goals.

text: Peirce, meaning and the semantic web The so-called ‘Semantic Web’ is phase II of Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision for the WWW, whereby resources would no longer be indexed merely ‘syntactically’, via opaque character-strings, but via their meanings. We argue that one roadblock to Semantic Web development has been researchers’ adherence to a Cartesian, ‘private’ account of meaning, which has been dominant for the last 400 years, and which understands the meanings of signs as what their producers intend them to mean. It thus strives to build ‘silos of meaning’ which explicitly and antecedently determine what signs on the Web will mean in all possible situations. By contrast, the field is moving forward insofar as it embraces Peirce’s ‘public’, evolutionary account of meaning, according to which the meaning of signs just is the way they are interpreted and used to produce further signs. Given the extreme interconnectivity of the Web, it is argued that silos of meaning are unnecessary as plentiful machine-understandable data about the meaning of Web resources exists already in the form of those resources themselves, for applications that are able to leverage it, and it is Peirce’s account of meaning which can best make sense of the recent explosion in ‘user-defined content’ on the Web, and its relevance to achieving Semantic Web goals.

year: 2007-06

title: Mining Domain-Specific Thesauri from Wikipedia: A case study

authors: Milne, David N.

subjects: computer science

abstract: Domain-specific thesauri are high-cost, high-maintenance, high-value knowledge structures. We show how the classic thesaurus structure of terms and links can be mined automatically from Wikipedia. In a comparison with a professional thesaurus for agriculture we find that Wikipedia contains a substantial proportion of its concepts and semantic relations; furthermore it has impressive coverage of contemporary documents in the domain. Thesauri derived using our techniques capitalize on existing public efforts and tend to reflect contemporary language usage better than their costly, painstakingly-constructed manual counterparts.

text: Mining Domain-Specific Thesauri from Wikipedia: A case study Domain-specific thesauri are high-cost, high-maintenance, high-value knowledge structures. We show how the classic thesaurus structure of terms and links can be mined automatically from Wikipedia. In a comparison with a professional thesaurus for agriculture we find that Wikipedia contains a substantial proportion of its concepts and semantic relations; furthermore it has impressive coverage of contemporary documents in the domain. Thesauri derived using our techniques capitalize on existing public efforts and tend to reflect contemporary language usage better than their costly, painstakingly-constructed manual counterparts.

year: 2006

title: Turangawaewae/ Tu'ungava'e: Echoes of a place to stand and belong

authors: Brown Pulu, Teena J.

subjects: Maori

abstract: This paper examines the ways in which Pacific communities in Auckland are located and conceptualised by others in contrast to the ways in which they locate and conceptualise themselves. In particular, it looks at the ways in which, in the face of homeland fracture and socio-economic marginality, neighbourhoods are being reclaimed as places of belonging-ness, places in which informal alliances among Māori and Pacific groups are being forged. It also explores the problematic, often ambiguous, nature of these alliances.

text: Turangawaewae/ Tu'ungava'e: Echoes of a place to stand and belong This paper examines the ways in which Pacific communities in Auckland are located and conceptualised by others in contrast to the ways in which they locate and conceptualise themselves. In particular, it looks at the ways in which, in the face of homeland fracture and socio-economic marginality, neighbourhoods are being reclaimed as places of belonging-ness, places in which informal alliances among Māori and Pacific groups are being forged. It also explores the problematic, often ambiguous, nature of these alliances.

year: 2002-09