Pragmatic Semantics for the Web of Data

The success of the Web of Data (WOD) is based on the thorough understanding of, and agreement upon, the se- mantics of data and ontologies. But the Web of Data as a whole is complex, and inherently messy, contex- tualised, opinionated, in short: it is a market-place of ideas, rather than a database. Existing paradigms are in- appropriate for dealing with this new type of knowledge structures. The urgency of dealing with the non-standard charac- teristics of the Web of Data has been recognised, and separate initiatives try to tackle its individual manifes- tations, e.g. inconsistencies, contexts, vagueness, prove- nance, etc. Tomorrow’s Web of Data requires novel se- mantics with efficient (generic) implementations to en- sure semantic clarity, reuse and interoperability. We recently introduced pragmatic semantics as a new semantic paradigm integrating elements from market theory and classical semantics into a framework of op- timisation over truth-orderings, each representing a par- ticular world-view. We propose nature-based algorithms to implement those semantics. We recently started a new research project, called PraSem, with the goal of investigating Pragmatic Semantics both from a theoret- ical and practical perspective.