Arthur, I think it is hard to study the social impact of the semantic web as long as it is not implemented or used on a larger scale. Last summer I was at a conference with a panel-debate on the Semantic Web and the views varied widely on the feasibility of the idea.
Has anyone come across any material which takes a critical look at the social impact of the Semantic Web as envisaged by TIM BERNERS-LEE, et al.?
The basic idea of giving the web (or parts of it) one or more deeper classficatory structure(s) obviously reactualizes discussions about classifications and (because this is a project being promoted by and in AI circles) AI and finally also in philosophy of logic. A social approach to some of the issues of classfication can be found in: Bowker, G. C. &. S., S.L. (1999). Sorting Things Out - Classification and its Consequences. Cambridge, MA & London, UK: The MIT Press. Another approach is to tie it to existing AI discussions going many years back (and not as high profiled as they were in the late 80's), of which Dreyfus' work (as mentioned by Charles Ess) is one important contribution. John Sowa (philosopher) has written some good introductions to classification-systems, knowledge representation etc. see fx. http://www.jfsowa.com/ontology/guided.htm Best, Rune ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rune Dalgaard, MA, Doctoral Candidate Dept. of Information and Media Studies, Aarhus University E-mail: runed@imv.aau.dk / Web: http://www.imv.au.dk/medarbejdere/runed ----------------------------------------------------------------------------