> From: David Kane
> The semantic web is based on a fundamental assumption that language is the basis of intelligence.

News to me.  I'd be willing to accept that it's based on grouping related things together as concepts - something animals can clearly do, although depending on the animals concerned the communication of those concepts between individuals (language, in its broadest form) is sometimes easy, sometimes hard.  It's also based on transferring information about these concepts between systems - in an unpleasantly informal way, as OWL, at least, was deliberately broken in at least two ways so as to *prevent* unambiguous communication.

> It is also based on the assumption that individual humans are logical creatures.

Also news to me.  I'd be willing to accept that (some of) it is based on the assumption that computers are better at logical reasoning than they are at human-style decision-making.

> Neither of these assumptions are true.

I agree with this comment, but as I disagree with your assertion that the Semanic Web is based on either of the assumptions then I don't see that as a problem for the Semantic Web.

> The fact is that language is only a tool for transferring information between intelligences and its inherent ambiguity makes it a poor building block for creating internet-sized edifices of syllogistic logic.

See, for example, Wittgenstein - if you can understand his ambiguous language :-).  Indeed.  Hence the requirement for heavily-constrained communication in the Semantic Web if anything's ever going to get done - and correctly-layered and correctly-defined standards, which is my main beef with the whole thing.

> Social media I like better.  It 'keeps it real' - staying close to what humans are and do best, which is to be community.

It's also extremely hard for computers to extract meaningful-to-humans information from unconstrained social media.  You need constraints or formalisation of (some of) what is communicated, otherwise chaos reigns in such communities.  Even if those constraints are the schema of a forum or a blog, they are still formalised - merely formalised by local convention, such as a phpBB board or a Facebook app.  Where that local convention is removed or ignored in the interests of moving between communities, for example in the typical current generation of RSS feeds, much of the ability to extract meaningful information goes as well.

> We should be watching what communities of people are doing with these technologies today.

Undoubtedly true.  I think there should be research into how adjacent or overlapping communities communicate, as one of the major problems these days is that the "silo mentality" is no longer appropriate for most communities, scholarly or otherwise.  How does one assist a member of an adjacent community when they suddenly need to learn about a somewhat new area?  This is one area in which more formalised communication, such as via the Semantic Web, *could* assist.

                - Peter