Presentations and Bearers of Semantics on the Web

May 2002

Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 2002)

Volume

Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 2002)

All Papers

We use an example from information retrieval to explore Web-based semantics, which can be presented in different ways and carried by different bearers of the information retrieval process. We describe four presentations of semantics: natural language with minimal markup, simple metadata, basic data models, and logical semantics. Each presentation of semantics can be borne by human users, search interfaces, documents, or search systems. We show that different presentations of semantics vary across a spectrum of expressiveness and arbitrariness of meanings that are shared and processed during information retrieval.