Emergent semantics: Principles and issues

Abstract. Information and communication infrastructures underwent a rapid and extreme decentralization process over the past decade: From a world of statically and partially connected central servers rose an in-tricate web of millions of information sources loosely connecting one to another. Today, we expect to witness the extension of this revolution with the wide adoption of meta-data standards like RDF or OWL un-derpinning the creation of a semantic web. Again, we hope for global properties to emerge from a multiplicity of pair-wise, local interactions, resulting eventually in a self-stabilizing semantic infrastructure. This pa-per represents an effort to summarize the conditions under which this revolution would take place as well as an attempt to underline its main properties, limitations and possible applications.