Web to semantic web: limitations of the automated approach

As a mathematician who has in the past dealt with natural language processing, in particular for the so called linguistic class of creole and pidgin languages, using the Papiamento creole language spoken in Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao as a reference, and has consequently also built up a working knowledge of just about everything related to storing written or printed information, I must hereby point out some severe limitations the internet itself imposes on us.

The internet is not a flat structure and for that matter not easily defined at all as a uniformly structured multidimensional space.

For all practical purposes it is defined best by the network links and logical mappings.

The logical layers for information available on the internet, defined by DNS, IP addesses and site and directory structures on servers are somewhat simpler to deal with, although the IP numbering scheme is currently about to run out of addresses, which will be dealt with by migrating to a newer IP protocol.

When users put information on the internet, this is in general not done in standard compliant formats for information structure.

Most new features of the social networking type on the internet do not readily lend themselves for structure.

Going back to linguistics and philosopy 101, the internet has a large set of standard syntaxes, for web page creation and web services.

The semantic web strives to structure syntactically prestructured information into a form where semantical information is added.

Somehow everyone seems to have for now ignored the pragmatic aspects of the web.
Only humans and sufficiently well equipped software processes can attach pragmatic content to data and structured information.

Therefore we should ask ourselves what type of information processes take place at the pragmatics level, and what required semantic structures need to be in place to achieve successful utilization of pragmatic processes.

For now only humans fit the bill for being able to define pragmatic contexts.

The question then becomes which of these processes will require what type of semantic structures and how do these translate into requirements for addressing, data storage and data access interfaces, and off course transport (3G/4G GSM, internet etc.)

If we look at the physical structure of the internet we see nodes (computers/servers) and links (logical level/transport level).

Anyone familiar with Godel's Theorem which deals with the inherent mathematical inconsistency of complete logical systems will know that its application to the internet implies severe limitations for structuring knowledge on the internet.

We can unleash all the recent advancements in the fields of cognitive sciences, natural language processing, artificial intelligence and knowledge engineering on the web in the hope they can to some extent help harness the semantic content of structured and unstructured data and information.

At best they will serve to create subdomains of highly structured data and information readily available for pre-set query types.

This is compounded by the fact that a lot of information on the internet is created out of free will by humans and (still) subject to freedom of opinion and speech principles, which include the right not to have your data structured semantically!

Again the 64 million dollar question remains, how many users, how much data/information and how many query types can we come up with, so that the numbers may inspire corporations, the academia and libraries, professionals, users and IT developers to allocate resources to optimizing the subdomain of the internet which can be optimized for semantic web purposes?

I have yet to see any of these numbers in a report on semantic web applications on the internet.

Milton Ponson
GSM: +297 747 8280
Rainbow Warriors Core Foundation
PO Box 1154, Oranjestad
Aruba, Dutch Caribbean
www.rainbowwarriors.net (under revision)
Project Paradigm: A structured approach to bringing the tools for sustainable development to all stakeholders worldwide
www.projectparadigm.info (under construction)
NGO-Opensource: Creating ICT tools for NGOs worldwide for Project Paradigm
www.ngo-opensource.org (proposed project)
MetaPortal: providing online access to web sites and repositories of data and information for sustainable development
www.metaportal.info (proposed project)
SemanticWebSoftware, part of NGO-Opensource to enable SW technologies in the Metaportal project (proposed site: www.semanticwebsoftware.org)


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