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Social semantics : the search for meaning on the web
Halpin H., Springer Publishing Company, Incorporated, New York, NY, 2014. 238 pp. Type: Book (978-1-461418-84-9)
Date Reviewed: Oct 1 2014

The World Wide Web, one of the most significant computational phenomena today, evolved into a ubiquitous information space that can affect our understanding of matters. There exist dozens of books about the web exploring its various aspects, mostly technical. Halpin’s book is different. It examines the impact of the web on difficult questions of meaning, including its reference to representation. The main question of the book is how meaning is assigned to representation. Specifically considering the web, the question is how to assign meaning to a uniform resource identifier (URI).

The web is considered here as a kind of new language within its “information space in which the items of interest, referred to as resources, are identified by global identifiers called URI” [1]. Most web practitioners and even researchers may have never thought of the URI as the thing that binds the web together. This book gives rise to such thought. In fact, readers will not find an exact answer to this hard question. Instead, they will find in the book a complex view on the problem of identity and reference, which is related and has a strong impact on the core tasks of the web. I like the author’s position that the meaning of a URI is provided by the network of representations and their use.

The book is interdisciplinary; it combines philosophical and technical aspects in a unique way. The well-known philosophical theories of reference and representation are applied to the web. As the book is a reworked version of Halpin’s thesis, it should naturally appeal to postgraduate students and researchers in computer science and related fields (information systems especially). Also, web practitioners working with search engines, the semantic web, or language theory, or simply curious fellows who are interested not only in a practical description of things, but also like to think out of the box, will find the book valuable.

The book is divided into seven chapters, plus references and an index. After an introductory chapter, Halpin starts in chapter 2 with a historical analysis of the web aimed at understanding its boundaries along with normative documents that define the web. He argues that “not only may the web reveal general insights about the nature of representation, but its unique historical status as the first actual universal information space may prompt an entire re-thinking of semantics.” Most of this chapter is devoted to an introduction of the web architecture.

Chapter 3 introduces the basics of knowledge representation of the semantic web, that is, the resource description framework (RDF), a kind of URI-based knowledge representation language. Halpin continues with a debate on how to assign meaning to a URI, and explains two distinct positions on this issue: the logicist position and the direct reference position.

Experimental work is the focus of chapters 5 and 6. First, collaborative tagging systems as a means for assignment of a meaning to a URI by a set of terms are explored. Chapter 6 extends the folksonomy collected by collaborative tagging systems to search engines considering the “bag-of-words,” characterizing a document as a meaning of the URI representing the document. Finally, based on experimental work and inspired by Wittgenstein’s philosophical insights on the social and public notion of language, in chapter 7 Halpin presents his position on social semantics that understands language as “a public mechanism among multiple agents” and determines the meaning of a URI as “socially grounded use of networks of representations on the web by ordinary users.”

Particular ideas presented in this book were previously published in proceedings of international workshops, conferences, and journals, all thoroughly mentioned in particular places in the text and listed in the references section, which is also a valuable source of additional readings.

Working on topics related to the web, I will definitely recommend this book to all of my doctoral students, as it stimulates deep thinking on the web qua web as a subject matter. It should be of particular interest also to students and researchers in the new field of web science. I appreciate Halpin’s position, which does not stop with answers sufficient for machines that provide automated inference engines, but explores the answers that will satisfy humans in defining the meaning of a URI, a core element of the language created by the World Wide Web.

Reviewer:  M. Bielikova Review #: CR142779 (1501-0031)
1) Jacobs, I.; Walsh, N. Architecture of the World Wide Web. Technical report. W3C, 2004.
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Semantic Networks (I.2.4 ... )
 
 
Web-Based Interaction (H.5.3 ... )
 
 
World Wide Web (WWW) (H.3.4 ... )
 
 
Group And Organization Interfaces (H.5.3 )
 
 
Systems And Software (H.3.4 )
 
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