Towards A Semantic Web

Dr Bill Cope is Research Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA and Director of Common Ground Publishing. He is the co-author or editor of a number of books, including, with Angus Phillips, The Future of the Book in the Digital Age, also published by Chandos, in 2006. Dr Mary Kalantzis is Dean of the College of Education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and, with Bill Cope, co-author of The Powers of Literacy, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993; Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures, Routledge, 2000; New Learning: Elements of a Science of Education, Cambridge University Press, 2008; and Ubiquitous Learning, University of Illinois Press, 2009. Dr Liam Magee is a research project leader at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, working on the theory and practice of the semantic web.

"A good book for its wealth of sometimes profound insights into the evolution of scholarship and scientific communication from a relatively static print culture into what's already emerged as a protean electronic culture." --College and Research Libraries

• List of figures and tables FiguresAuthorsChapter 1: Changing knowledge systems in the era of the social webFrom print to digital textDistributed knowledge systems: the changing role of the universityAbout this bookChapter 2: Frameworks for knowledge representationPutting things in orderIntroducing the semantic webTowards a framing of semanticsChapter 3: The meaning of meaning: alternative disciplinary perspectivesLinguistic semanticsCognitive semanticsSocial semanticsComputational semanticsChapter 4: What does the digital do to knowledge making?The work of knowledge representation in the age of its digital reproducibilityThe old and the new in the representation of meaning in the era of its digital reproductionThe hyperbole of the virtualThe hype in hypertextThe mechanics of renderingA new navigational orderMultimodalityThe ubiquity of recording and documentationA shift in the balance of representational agencyA new dynamics of differenceConclusionsChapter 5: Books and journal articles: the textual practices of academic knowledgeThe role of knowledge representation in knowledge designThe scholarly monographThe academic journalFuture knowledge systemsConclusionsChapter 6: Textual representations and knowledge support-systems in research intensive networksIntroductionTowards an ontology of knowledgeThe theory of hierarchically complex systemsResearch knowledge and the dynamics of hierarchically complex systemsImplications for managing research enterprises in a knowledge societyPublic knowledge and the notion of a public knowledge spacePublic knowledge and contextual information management practicesPublic knowledge and the role of knowledge brokeringConclusionsAppendix: a preliminary ontology for research knowledge support;Chapter 7: An historical introduction to formal knowledge systemsPre-modernity: logical lineagesEarly modernity: the mechanisation of thoughtCrises in modernity: the order of logic and the chaos of historyChapter 8: Contemporary dilemmas: tables versus websOrdering the world by relationsEarly threads of the semantic webShifting trends or status quo?Systems of knowledge: modern and postmodernKnowledge systems in social contextChapter 9: Upper-level ontologiesA survey of upper-level ontologiesA dialogical account of ontology engineeringConclusions: assessing commensurabilityAppendix: upper-level ontologies— supplementary dataChapter 10: Describing knowledge domains: a case study of biological ontologiesBiological ontologiesBiological cultures, ontological culturesOntological objectsTowards compromise: ontologies in practiceChapter 11: On commensurabilityA world of ‘material intangibles’: social structures, conceptual schemes and cultural perspectivesDe-structuring critiques: struggling with systems, structures and schemesInterlude: constructions of scienceElastic structures: linking the linguistic, the cognitive and the socialTowards a framework…Chapter 12: A framework for commensurabilityWhat to measure—describing ‘ontological cultures’Presenting a framework for commensurabilityApplying the frameworkChapter 13: Creating an interlanguage of the social webThe discursive practice of markupStructural markupMetamarkup: developing markup frameworksDeveloping an interlanguage mechanismSchema alignment for semantic publishing: the example of Common Ground Markup LanguageWhat tagging schemas doInterlanguageChapter 14: Interoperability and the exchange of humanly usable digital contentIntroductionThe transformation of digital contentThe XML-based interlanguage approach: two examplesThe ontology-based interlanguage approach: OntoMergeEvaluating approaches to interoperabilityAddressing the translation problem: emergent possibilitiesConclusionsAcknowledgementsChapter 15: Framing a new agenda for semantic publishingThe academic language gameDisciplinarity, or the reason why strategically unnatural language is sometimes powerfully perceptiveExperiential knowledge processesConceptual knowledge processesAnalytical knowledge processesApplied knowledge processesTowards a new agenda for semantic publishingIndex