In the 1990s, cultural theorists who speculated about the implications of the
Internet for society, education, interpersonal interaction and academic research tended to base their thinking on the assumptions of semiotics, or, in its
most radical form, deconstruction. There was an emphasis on hypertext and
hypermedia. The driving forces of that initial decade of the Internet have left
us with a Semiotic Information Science: the study, design and implementation of communicating processes and relations – in a word, links –among nodes of information. In libraries and businesses, archives and museums, we
catalog, index, manipulate, store and retrieve information. The paradigm shift to a Semantic Web and a Semantic Information Science offers the strong hope that we can move towards a science and society of qualitatively greater knowledge and intelligence. I advocate an expansion of the meaning of Semantic Web from a set of standard data formats for including "semantic" content in web pages to semantics understood as the branches of linguistics, computer science and psychology that deal with meaning. A Semantic Information Science will focus on the contexts that give meaning to words (as
in linguistic lexical semantics), emphasize the ineffable and experiential
qualities of "nodes of information" (as in psychological semantics), and
deepen the meanings and interpretations of programming expressions (as in
my proposed extension of computer science semantics). Semantic software (see the SBSGRID platform) will provide natural language access to databases, return answers to associative questions, bring together the flexibility of search with the precision of query, and contextually fathom the user’s needs. The more meaningful information of the Semantic Web and a Semantic Information Science will help us to "work, play, learn and care for our health
differently"(ibid.) and give us more meaningful lives.
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