Social Meaning on the Web: From Wittgenstein to Search EnginesOne could hypothesize that the biggest question for the Web is whether multiple agents in a decentralized information space can share meaning via the use of uniform resource identifiers (URIs), such as http://www. example.org. On the hypertext Web, this bet was trivial; most of the time a URI would identify a Web page by virtue of allowing access to the Web page itself. However, even in the Web's earliest stages, URIs were for more than just accessing Web pages: they united the previous disparate protocols of the Internet into a single seamless and smooth space of information, where any network-accessible object could be given a URI. Yet, as Tim Berners-Lee noted in his keynote speech to the World Wide Web Conference in 1994, "To a computer, then, the web is a flat, boring world devoid of meaning. This is a pity, as in fact documents on the web describe real objects and imaginary concepts, and give particular relationships between them." The goal of the Semantic Web, then, is to give URIs to "real objects and imaginary concepts" as well as to the "relationships between them." However, there is a fly in the ointment: a Web browser cannot simply access a real object like the Eiffel Tower via HTTP! So, the original question of what a URI identifies, which we could answer earlier by trivially accessing a Web page, transforms into the open question of how agents can determine what non-Web-accessible thing a URI on the Semantic Web identifies in a decentralized manner. This is the defining problem for the evolution of the Web into the Semantic Web. Friends Forever: How Young Adolescents Use Social-Networking SitesIt is perhaps difficult to believe that the term social-networking site (SNS) was not widely recognized back in 2004, when teenagers in the US first discovered MySpace. Young adolescents have only begun to use SNSs with such enthusiasm in the past three years, with the starting age becoming ever younger, despite these sites' minimum age requirement of 13. In the past decade, there has been immense interest in looking at children's use of the Internet, and in the past year or two, the notion of studying young people's SNSs such as Bebo, Facebook, and Piczo has generated several large research studies. Many parents, perhaps prompted by media headlines warning of the "dark side" of such sites, are fearful of their children's use of SNSs. Mizuko Ito considers this, and argues that although adults might worry that their children are becoming socially isolated, "what's interesting … with the Internet and gaming is that most of these activities are being conducted in a social context, even though the kids may not be physically together." |
IEEE Intelligent Systems magazine covers the theory and applications of systems that perceive, reason, learn, and act intelligently. Calls for papers>> Mobile Information Retrieval >> Context-Aware Middleware and Intelligent Agents for Smart Environments >> AI in Space |
