A conceptual model for Socio-Pragmatic Web based on activity theory

Abstract

How is the future of the Web, as one of the most influential inventions of the twentieth century? Today, there are great conceptual gaps between the Web 2.0 (Social Web), Web 3.0 (Semantic Web), and Web 4.0 (Pragmatic Web) generations. Every generation of Web is merely an independent conceptual branch of Web and the future Web needs to benefit from the combination of concepts from each generation. This paper has three distinct contributions to make for paving the way for the future Web. First, we tried to extract all main concepts of today’s Web, and propose them as the principles for the future Web, which we name the Socio-Pragmatic Web (SPWeb). Then, we use the Activity Theory (AT) as a transdisciplinary theory for human social behavior to provide a conceptual model for SPWeb. Our conceptual model offers generic Knowledge-Embodied Agents (KEA) in three different abstraction levels as the building blocks of SPWeb. As different KEA types, Web Service-KEA, Artificial Intelligent-KEA, and Cognitive-KEA have different levels of capabilities. For each KEA type, we propose different elements and technologies of today’s Web as the candidates for their development to prove the feasibility of these KEAs. Finally, we will show that the Concept Realization and Weaving Functions of the KEA models altogether can generate a powerful future web, as it satisfies SPWeb’s principles.

Keywords

• socio-pragmatic web (spweb)
• social web
• semantic web
• pragmatic web
• activity theory
• knowledge-embodied agent
• concept realization
• object construction