Beyond the Semantic Web: Towards an Implicit Pragmatic Web and a Web of Social Representations

Abstract

Motivated by the distinction between semantics and pragmatics as sub-disciplines of linguistics, shortly after Tim Berners-Lee introduced the Semantic Web in 2001, there have been works on its extension to the “pragmatic level”. Twenty years later, the Semantic Web is more popular than ever, while little has been achieved in extending it into a Pragmatic Web. Social representations introduced by Serge Moscovici in the 1960s seem totally ignored by the information technology community even though they are strongly related to research on opinion mining and representation in social media. We, thus, recall the major results of academic research on the Pragmatic Web, followed by our proposal for an Implicit Pragmatic Web inspired by various sub-domains of the discipline of pragmatics. We further recall the basics of the social representations theory and discuss their potential implementations in a Web of Social Representations and thus their potential contribution towards at least a part of the future internet.

Keywords

• Semantic Web
• Pragmatic Web
• implicatures
• presuppositions
• social representations