News Story

Semantic Web? Next stop: Pragmatic Web

Simon Buckingham Shum, Saturday 23 September 2006 | Annotate

I've just returned from an interdisciplinary gathering at the 1st International Pragmatic Web Conference in Stuttgart. Borrowing from the linguistic metaphor of Syntax/Semantics/Pragmatics, the emerging vision of the Pragmatic Web focuses on the contextual factors that make formalisms (like ontologies) and other communicative acts over the Web, meaningful. I described how my work on Hypermedia Discourse intersects with Web Pragmatics. PragWeb is distinctive in the communities it connects. While there is much research and development into Web usability, community informatics, and the formal semantics on the Web, the Pragmatic Web conference provides common ground for dialogue at the nexus of these topics. I will be co-chairing the 2007 Pragmatic Web conference - details to be announced shortly...

Related Links:

• www.PragmaticWeb.info
• Sensemaking on the Pragmatic Web: A Hypermedia Discourse Perspective