Semantic Web and Chinese

Recently, I've been doing research on the semantic web and be astonished by the number of utterly unjustified claims and the conceptual mess that circulates. But all this will be a matter of more structured and academic discussion at NACAP 2007. In this blog, I like to call your attention to the following point.

We all know that China will probably dominate the international scenario for years to come. Chinese has been a fascinating language for philosophers at least since Leibniz. Indeed, his idea of a characteristica universalis owes much to his interest in Chinese.

Now, there is a major difference between Indo-European languages (like English) and Chinese: the former are more subject-prominent languages, the latter belongs to the family of more topic-prominent languages. (note)

Oversimplifying, in one case (subject-prominence) there is preference for sentences likes "Mary likes pizza", with a subject, a predicate and an object; in the other case (topic-prominence), there is a preference for sentences like "As for food, Mary prefers pizza", where there is a topic and a comment on it.

Sounds familiar? Let me make another oversimplified statement: Indo-European languages think in terms of Semantic Web, Chinese thinks in terms of Web 2.0.

In one case, the key issue is to have URI and triple-relations of the kind "x is y". Good old fashioned Greek metaphysics. This is the essence of every ontology.

In the other case, you state a topic and tag it.

All this explains why I found it a bit ironic when I read that:

Web technology, therefore, must not discriminate between the scribbled draft and the polished performance, between commercial and academic information, or among cultures, languages, media and so on. Information varies along many axes." (note)

and realise that this is attempted by a massive Indo-Europeization of the web itself.

Will the Web be more Indo-European or more Chinese?

The boring answer: probably a bit of both.

The smart money: probably on the latter. After all we are the only intelligent semantic engines around. You get what you tag.