The philosophers’ fascination with propositions was mirrored in good old-fashioned AI, the AI of John McCarthy, early Marvin Minsky, and Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, and Cliff Shaw. It was the idea that the way to make an intelligent agent was from the top down. You have a set of propositions in some proprietary…
NLP works well statistically; the SW, in contrast, requires logic and doesn't yet make substantial use of statistics. Natural language is democratic, as expressed in the slogan 'meaning is use' (see Section 5.1 for more discussion of this). The equivalent in the SW of the words of natural language are logical terms…
It is argued - though currently the arguments are filtering only slowly into the academic literature - that folksonomies are preferable to the use of controlled, centralised ontologies [e.g. 259]. Annotating Web pages using controlled vocabularies will improve the chances of one's page turning up on the 'right' Web…
Time-stamping is of interest because the temporal element of context is essential for understanding a text (to take an obvious example, when reading a paper on global geopolitics in 2006 it is essential to know whether it was written before or after 11th September, 2001). Furthermore, some information has a 'sell-by…
Another key factor in assessing the trustworthiness of a document is the reliability or otherwise of the claims expressed within it; metadata about provenance will no doubt help in such judgements but need not necessarily resolve them. Representing confidence in reliability has always been difficult in epistemic…
Nevertheless, the next generation Web should not be based on the false assumption that text is predominant and keyword-based search will be adequate for all reasonable purposes [127]. Indeed, the issues relating to navigation through multimedia repositories such as video archives and through theWeb are not unrelated…
Web topology contains more complexity than simple linear chains. In this section, we will discuss attempts to measure the global structure of the Web, and how individual webpages fit into that context. Are there interesting representations that define or suggest important properties? For example, might it be possible…
Perhaps the best-known paradigm for studying the Web is graph theory. The Web can be seen as a graph whose nodes are pages and whose (directed) edges are links. Because very few weblinks are random, it is clear that the edges of the graph encode much structure that is seen by designers and authors of content as…
IR is the focus for an arms race between algorithms to extract information from repositories as those repositories get larger and more complex, and users' demands get harder to satisfy (either in terms of response time or complexity of query). One obvious issue with respect to IR over the Web is that the Web has no QA…
One view is reminiscent of the philosophical idea of supervenience [168, 169]). One discourse or set of expressions A supervenes on another set B when a change in A entails a change in B but not vice versa. So, on a supervenience theory of the mind/brain, any change in mental state entails some change in brain state…
There are many different types of reasoning, but not too many have been successfully automated beyond deductive linear reasoning and various statistical methods. What alternative methods has the Web facilitated? One obvious candidate is associative reasoning, where reasoning on the basis of associations - which can be…