The Semantic Web as the apotheosis of annotation, but what are its semantics?

The paper discussed what kind of entity the proposed Semantic Web (SW) is, in terms of the relationship of language to knowledge representation (KR). It argues that there are three views: first, that the SW is basically a renaming of the traditional AI knowledge representation task, with all the problems and challenges of that task. If that is the case, as many believe, then there is no particular reason to expect progress in this new form of presentation as all the problems of logic reappear and it will be no more successful outside the narrow scientific domains where KR seems to work and the formal ontology movement has brought some benefits. Secondly, the paper argues that there is a view that the SW will be the World Wide Web with its constituent documents annotated so as to yield their content or meaning structure. This view of the SW makes natural language processing central as the procedural bridge from texts to KR, usually via a form of automated Information Extraction. This view is discussed in some detail and it is argued that this is in fact the only way of justifying the structures used as KR for any SW. there is a third view, possibly Berners-Lee's own that the SW is about trusted databases as the foundation of a system of web processes and services, but it is argued that this ignores the whole history of the web as a textual system, and gives no better guarantee of agreed meanings for terms.