Greetings!
Human communication is all about conveying meaning from one person to another. Language, be it spoken or written, is a medium used to carry the meaning. It should have been obvious from this that any attempt to process texts or manage documents, web pages, or other forms of repositorized knowledge must deal with meaning, i.e., the processing must go on essentially at the semantic level.
Why then is this not so? From the early days of computational linguistics to the development of information retrieval, search engines, and knowledge management systems, we have mostly been processing at the syntax or symbol level... as though there is no meaning underlying the texts. We have built systems and shown results with techniques such as statistics that ignore meaning, or at least do not deal with it directly. Every now and then we have come back to attempt a semantic approach to things, but only with very limited success.
Of course semantics is hard. So why do I think it is time once again to bring to the fore the unpopular semantic approaches to managing text, document, content, and knowledge?
This blog will present a series of articles dedicated to this issue. Being a blog, I might occasionally take the liberty of discussing topics less directly related to semantic approaches to knowledge management.
Your comments and criticisms will be most helpful in debating these issues. May the better approach win!
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