Why the Semantic Web Has Never Got Too Much of a Meaning and How to Put It There?

Abstract. Our outrageous idea concerns the very core of the Semantic Web – the (lack of) semantics themselves. In Section 1 we claim that the presently used conception of web semantics fails to capture the link between the machine-readable descriptions and their actual meaning (in the sense of a formal grounding in reality). We also argue that this is inherently related to culprits of various difficulties the community has been coping with (e.g., knowledge acquisition bottleneck or data integra-tion challenges). In Section 2 we propose a remedy of this unsatisfactory state of affairs – a broadened notion of emergent web meaning that can be derived in a bottom-up manner from the web data using principles of distributional semantics. Section 3 gives an overview of a preliminary solution [1] we recently implemented with promising results. Finally, we outline directions of future research required to fully realise our vision. 1 The (Lack of) Semantics in the Semantic Web The Semantic Web has been designed for asserting meaning to things via ma