Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web provides a unique introduction to identity and reference theories of the World Wide Web, through the academic lens of philosophy of language and data-driven statistical models. The Semantic Web is a natural evolution of the Web, and this book covers the URL-based Web architecture and Semantic Web in detail. It has a robust empirical side which has an impact on industry. Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web discusses how the largest problem facing the Semantic Web is the problem of identity and reference, and how these are the results of a larger general theory of meaning. This book hypothesizes that statistical semantics can solve these problems, illustrated by case studies ranging from a pioneering study of tagging systems to using the Semantic Web to boost the results of commercial search engines. Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web targets practitioners working in the related fields of the semantic web, search engines, information retrieval, philosophers of language and more. Advanced-level students and researchers focusing on computer science will also find this book valuable as a secondary text or reference book.

Presenting original, detailed studies of keywords of Danish, this book breaks new ground for the study of language and cultural values. Based on evidence from the semantic categories of everyday language, such as the Danish concept of hygge (roughly meaning, ‘pleasant togetherness’), the book provides an integrative socio-cognitive framework for studying and understanding language-particular universes. It is argued that the worlds we live in are not linguistically and conceptually neutral, but rather that speakers who live by Danish concepts are likely to pay attention to their world in ways suggested by central Danish keywords and lexical grids. By means of a sophisticated semantic methodology, the author accounts for the meanings of even highly culture-specific and untranslatable linguistic concepts. The book offers new tools for comparative research into the diversity of semantic and cultural systems in contemporary Europe. Additionally, it contributes to the emerging discipline of cultural semantics, and to the ongoing debates of linguistic diversity, metalanguage, and the use of linguistic evidence in studies of culture and social cognition.

Originally published in 1980, this book examines the major issues in the philosophy of social science, paying specific attention to cross-cultural understanding, humanism versus scientism, individualism versus collectivism, and the shaping of theory by evaluative commitment. Arguing for a cross-cultural conception of human beings, the authors defend humanism and individualism, and reject the notion that social inquiry is necessarily vitiated by an adherence to values.

"This book presents an alternative view to ubiquitous and pervasive knowledge, architectural frameworks, and methodological issues, and introduces some of the major techniques and tools developed in the domain of ontology building, analysis, and semantic Web"--Provided by publisher.

Originally published in 1980, this book examines the major issues in the philosophy of social science, paying specific attention to cross-cultural understanding, humanism versus scientism, individualism versus collectivism, and the shaping of theory by evaluative commitment. Arguing for a cross-cultural conception of human beings, the authors defend humanism and individualism, and reject the notion that social inquiry is necessarily vitiated by an adherence to values.

An empirical case study is used here to analyze linguistic meaning as it is embedded in complex social behavior. The whole of a natural signalling system - its nonlinguistic conventions, pragmatics and semantics - is considered. Three sections analyze: the relevant conventional facts; conventional utterance meaning in terms of conventional facts; and, finally, sentence meaning in terms of conventional utterance meaning. Linguistic meaning is seen to be derived from meaningful social behavior rather than from goal-directed behavior of individuals. A number of new results on pragmatic and semantic meaning are reached.

The only book offering an overview of third-wave variation research and theory, which is an approach centered on social meaning.

Relying on a wealth of new data, this book argues that long-standing puzzles of Negative Inversion (NI) syntax are not puzzles at all when viewed through the lenses of Gricean pragmatics and Labovian sociolinguistics. Focusing on sentences such as "Can't nobody lift that rock" in African American, Anglo, and Chicano Englishes in Texas, the book provides tidy solutions to problems such as: the NI’s relationship to its non-inverted counterpart, its relationship to existential “there” sentences, to modal existential sentences, to the definiteness effects surrounding its NP subject, the emphatic meaning with which it seems to be associated, and more. The book argues that such issues, which have been explored in the syntax and semantics literature since the late 1960s, are handled more fruitfully via Gricean reasoning, demographics of use, and a simple semantics. As such, the book argues that NI can be freed from the “syntactico-semantic straitjacket” into which it has often been forced. It also demonstrates ways in which pragmatic and sociolinguistic thought can be brought together to inform larger linguistic analyses.

The Social Web (including services such as MySpace, Flickr, last.fm, and WordPress) has captured the attention of millions of users as well as billions of dollars in investment and acquisition. Social websites, evolving around the connections between people and their objects of interest, are encountering boundaries in the areas of information integration, dissemination, reuse, portability, searchability, automation and demanding tasks like querying. The Semantic Web is an ideal platform for interlinking and performing operations on diverse person- and object-related data available from the Social Web, and has produced a variety of approaches to overcome the boundaries being experienced in Social Web application areas. After a short overview of both the Social Web and the Semantic Web, Breslin et al. describe some popular social media and social networking applications, list their strengths and limitations, and describe some applications of Semantic Web technology to address their current shortcomings by enhancing them with semantics. Across these social websites, they demonstrate a twofold approach for interconnecting the islands that are social websites with semantic technologies, and for powering semantic applications with rich community-created content. They conclude with observations on how the application of Semantic Web technologies to the Social Web is leading towards the "Social Semantic Web" (sometimes also called "Web 3.0"), forming a network of interlinked and semantically-rich content and knowledge. The book is intended for computer science professionals, researchers, and graduates interested in understanding the technologies and research issues involved in applying Semantic Web technologies to social software. Practitioners and developers interested in applications such as blogs, social networks or wikis will also learn about methods for increasing the levels of automation in these forms of Web communication.

This uniquely interdisciplinary collection of essays derives in part from a two-day international conference held at Heriot-Watt University in November 1999 and conceived as a critical forum for the discussion of the concept of interaction. The collection satisfies a continuing need for interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary research in the humanities and stems from an awareness of the growing currency of interactionist theories in several fields and the need to make a critical contribution to such theories and related concepts such as intersubjectivity and dialogism. Rather than advancing an apologetic view of interaction as something given, the contributors carefully consider and challenge commonly held epistemological and theoretical assumptions relating to the interaction concept. Interaction, if it is to be a meaningful concept, must be seen in terms of its modes (e.g. linguistic, media-based), units (language, logic, communication), objectives (understanding, consensus, stability) and fields of operation (face-to-face interaction, translation, social codification). This collection is intended to offer a provisional response to the question posed by one of its contributors, ‘What does it mean today that communication as the mechanism of social co-ordination has itself become complex?’. It means that erstwhile certainties of meaning transmission, stability, duality or dichotomy, identity and difference can be challenged and theoretically modelled in new contexts. Interdisciplinarity is one means by which to illuminate this complexity from several sides in the pursuit of theoretical blind spots in the field of critical communication studies. The book will be of particular interest to researchers and students in communication theory, linguistics, translation studies, logic, social psychology, discourse studies, European Studies, philosophy and semiotics.