Towards a Pragmatic Web

The Semantic Web is a promising step toward improving virtual community information systems. It gives information a clearer meaning, better enabling computers and people to cooperate. However, still lacking is the purpose of the information: how is it going to be used and evolve? In a Pragmatic Web, the context of the information would be defined as well, as the community examines goal-based conditional inferences in its work in progress. Scientific collaboratories could benefit substantially from such an approach. The PORT collaboratory was established to provide a model for pragmatic collaboratory evolution. In this paper, we outline a pragmatic community information systems development process by combining PORT with the Conceptual Graphs-based RENISYS method for the legitimate user-driven specification of community information systems. Peircean pragmatism provides a self-critical approach for tool selection in virtual communities.