. de Rooij , S., Beek, W., Bloem, P., van Harmelen , F., & Schlobach, S. Volume 9981 LNCS. Are names meaningful? Quantifying social meaning on the semantic web, pages 184–199. Springer/Verlag, 2016.
doi  abstract   bibtex   
According to its model-theoretic semantics, Semantic Web IRIs are individual constants or predicate letters whose names are chosen arbitrarily and carry no formal meaning. At the same time it is a well-known aspect of Semantic Web pragmatics that IRIs are often constructed mnemonically, in order to be meaningful to a human interpreter. The latter has traditionally been termed ‘social meaning’, a concept that has been discussed but not yet quantitatively studied by the Semantic Web community. In this paper we use measures of mutual information content and methods from statistical model learning to quantify the meaning that is (at least) encoded in Semantic Web names. We implement the approach and evaluate it over hundreds of thousands of datasets in order to illustrate its efficacy. Our experiments confirm that many Semantic Web names are indeed meaningful and, more interestingly, we provide a quantitative lower bound on how much meaning is encoded in names on a per-dataset basis. To our knowledge, this is the first paper about the interaction between social and formal meaning, as well as the first paper that uses statistical model learning as a method to quantify meaning in the Semantic Web context. These insights are useful for the design of a new generation of Semantic Web tools that take such social meaning into account.
@inbook{bd128ebb57df4bfdb31cc455c81cdbc6,
  title     = "Are names meaningful? Quantifying social meaning on the semantic web",
  abstract  = "According to its model-theoretic semantics, Semantic Web IRIs are individual constants or predicate letters whose names are chosen arbitrarily and carry no formal meaning. At the same time it is a well-known aspect of Semantic Web pragmatics that IRIs are often constructed mnemonically, in order to be meaningful to a human interpreter. The latter has traditionally been termed ‘social meaning’, a concept that has been discussed but not yet quantitatively studied by the Semantic Web community. In this paper we use measures of mutual information content and methods from statistical model learning to quantify the meaning that is (at least) encoded in Semantic Web names. We implement the approach and evaluate it over hundreds of thousands of datasets in order to illustrate its efficacy. Our experiments confirm that many Semantic Web names are indeed meaningful and, more interestingly, we provide a quantitative lower bound on how much meaning is encoded in names on a per-dataset basis. To our knowledge, this is the first paper about the interaction between social and formal meaning, as well as the first paper that uses statistical model learning as a method to quantify meaning in the Semantic Web context. These insights are useful for the design of a new generation of Semantic Web tools that take such social meaning into account.",
  author    = "{de Rooij}, Steven and Wouter Beek and Peter Bloem and {van Harmelen}, Frank and Stefan Schlobach",
  year      = "2016",
  doi       = "10.1007/978-3-319-46523-4_12",
  isbn      = "978-3-319-46522-7",
  volume    = "9981 LNCS",
  series    = "Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)",
  publisher = "Springer/Verlag",
  pages     = "184--199",
  booktitle = "The Semantic Web - 15th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2016, Proceedings",
}

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