# Beyond the Semantic Web: Towards an Implicit Pragmatic Web and a Web of Social Representations
## 4 Our Proposal for an Implicit Pragmatic Web and Web of Social Representations
### A Web of Social Representations
#### 4.2.4 An Example: Suicide in Brittany and Alsace  
Let us give an example based on [107]. This paper deals with the social representation of suicide. It is a comparative study of social representations in two anti-diametrical French regions: Alsace (culturally and geographically close to Germany) and Brittany (a culturally Celtic region). [PERSON] et al. used not the method of basic cognitive schemes described above, but a method of word associations introduced by [119]: the participants were asked to provide ten words (the restriction to words instead of cognemes is unfortunate, but made statistical calculations easier) associated with the question \"For you, suicide is?\". Once the data was collected, both the average rank and the frequency of words were calculated: those with high rank and frequency were considered to belong to the central core, and those with high values for one of the two dimensions were considered to belong to the inner periphery, and finally, those with low rank and frequency, to the outer periphery. Taking only the first five words, the results obtained can be seen in Table 2.  
Figure 3: A representation of the structure of an elementary instance \(R\) of social representation in the Web of Social Representations  
The central core is \"suffering, despair, death\". Even though it is clear that \"despair\" is a cause of suicide and \"death\" is its result, the word association method may be ambiguous, so we do not know whether the subjects meant \"suffering\" as felt by the victim or by their surroundings ([PERSON] is in favor of the former [131]). Similarly, the term \"solution\" is ambiguous: it is highly ranked (1.78) in Brittany but of low frequency (7%), while it is of lower rank in Alsace (2.23) but of higher frequency (11%). Maybe these differences result from a different meaning given to the term when used by the two populations. As can be seen in the table, the central core is the same for the two regions, except for the fifth term, which is \"depression\" for Alsace and \"collective trauma\" for Brittany. In addition, there is a term \"call for help\" in the outer periphery of Alsace, but not in any level of the social representation in Brittany. [PERSON] et al. interpret these differences as follows:  
it may be that the Alsace population has a more global view of the nature of depression and of some of its symptoms: sadness, despair, unhappiness, suffering. As a consequence, we could postulate that Alsacian population is more ready to identify depression, which might facilitate access to healthcare services for people suffering from depression. This hypothesis is supported by the presence of the item 'call for help'. ([107] p. 7)  
The authors continue on the differences between the two regions (Brittany has the highest suicide in France, namely 25 suicides per 100,000 inhabitants, while Alsace had a suicide of 10.7/100,000, as of 2015) and conclude with recommendations on an optimal way of achieving suicide prevention, adapted to each region. This is a beneficial application of social representations: to address a population or community efficiently, you need to know how it thinks, and social representations provide a solid account of shared beliefs, very often unconscious and sometimes surprising. The data of the above example would be encoded as follows in a Web of Social Representations:  
* Subject: Suicide (node Q10737 of Wikidata, and code CUI C0038661 of the Diseases Database ([[http://www.diseasesdatabase.com/umls_cui_home_plus.asp?strCUI=C038661](http://www.diseasesdatabase.com/umls_cui_home_plus.asp?strCUI=C038661)]([http://www.diseasesdatabase.com/umls_cui_home_plus.asp?strCUI=C038661](http://www.diseasesdatabase.com/umls_cui_home_plus.asp?strCUI=C038661)), accessed on 6 July 2023));
* Communities: Inhabitants of French region Brittany (Wikidata Q12130) and French region Alsace (Wikidata Q1142);
* Contents: the original triples are \"Suicide is Suffering\", \"Suicide is Despair\", \"Suicide is Death\", etc.