The Pragmatic Web

Ormai il “caro vecchio” Web non ci basta più… o almeno ci sembra troppo stantio e si sente il bisogno di trovargli sempre una “nuova vita”…un’evoluzione… parafrasando i girotondini lo slogan di fondo è “un web diverso è possibile”

Ne è riprova la coniazione di sempre nuovi termini che hanno tutti una caratteristica in comune: la parola WEB… dall’ormai “veterano” Semantic Web al “trendy” Web 2.0 fino addirittura al Web 3.0 (forse un po’ “azzardato”)

Recentemente però ha catturato la mia attenzione un “nuovo” termine che in realtà poi così nuovo non è…risale infatti al 2002 ad opera di un signore di nome Munindar P. Singh

Riporto qui qualche estratto dal pragmatic web manifesto:

The goal of the Semantic Web is to develop the basis for intelligent applications that enable more efficient information use by not just providing a set of linked documents but a collection of knowledge repositories with meaningful content and additional logic structure.
…
Will it work this way? According to Rob McCool, cofounder of the large-scale RDF project TAP, the answer is negative. “Because it’s a complex format and requires users to sacrifice expressivity and pay enormous costs in translation and maintenance, the Semantic Web will never achieve its widespread public adoption.”
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In order to enable the use of the Web for communicating, agreeing upon, and cooperatively modifying ontologies, the support provided by the Semantic Web is insufficient. An ontology is an agreed-upon conceptual specification used for making ontological commitments. The crucial question is: how do human agents commit and renegotiate their meaning commitments? And what kind of socio-technical infrastructure is required to leverage these conversations?
This Pragmatic Web constitutes the new challenge that will not replace but extend the Semantic Web. As Singh writes: “The best hope for the Semantic Web is to encourage the emergence of communities of interest and practice that develop their own consensus knowledge on the basis of which they will standardize their representations”
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The vision of the Pragmatic Web is thus to augment human collaboration effectively by appropriate technologies, such as systems for ontology negotiations, for ontology-based business interactions, and for pragmatic ontology-building efforts in communities of practice.
In this view, the Pragmatic Web complements the Semantic Web by improving the quality and legitimacy of collaborative, goal-oriented discourses in communities.

Nel settembre scorso è stata inoltre organizzata la prima “International Pragmatic Web Conference” in Germania
Riporto infine alcuni riferimenti interessanti (che io stesso mi riprometto di approfondire)

• Singh, M.P. The Pragmatic Web: Preliminary thoughts. In Proceedings of the NSFOntoWeb Workshop on Database and Information Systems Research for Semantic Web and Enterprises, (Apr. 2002), 82–90.

• Singh, M.P. The pragmatic web, IEEE Internet Comput. 6 (3) (2002).

• De Moor, A. Patterns for the Pragmatic Web. Proc. of the 13th International Conference on Conceptual Structures (ICCS 2005), July 18-22, Kassel, Germany. LNAI, Springer, Berlin

Sarà che sono sempre stato un tipo “pragmatico” ma quest’altra veste del caro vecchio web “a me me piace”;)