How semantic is semantic web?

I always find it quite hard to explain to people not directly involved  
with semantic web technologies what do we mean by ?semantic web? and  
in which sense it should be semantic. As I say ?semantic? everybody  
always thinks about language and text-retrieving mechanisms.

Thinking about this and about what definitely ?semantic? means, I  
realized that ontologies do not really deal with semantics, as they  
give no reference to things in real world: they deal with knowledge.
We all know that, as we build an ontology, we are explaining the  
structure of our knowledge, we are not giving a real meaning (i.e. a  
reference to things) to the terms we use, we are just explaining the  
relationships between concepts.
This is why I suggest to rename what we call semantic web using a new  
term, related more to knowledge and less to meanings. The term I found  
is epistematics, because of the relation with knowledge (epistéme) and  
of the analogy with informatics: as informatics deals with the  
automatic processing of informations, epistematics could point the  
automatic processing of knowledge, as allowed by ontologies and  
automatic reasonment.

I?d be glad to here your opinions about that;
you can find a detailed explanation of my arguments in pdf format  
here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1683/epistematics .


Thanks,

Chiara Carlino


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