Sony lab tips 'emergent semantics' to make sense of Web

Sony Computer Science Laboratory is positioning its "emergent semantics" as a self-organizing alternative to the W3C's Semantic Web that does not require any recoding of the data currently available online. Based on successful experiments with communities of robots, emergent-semantic technology is built on the principles of human learning, representatives of the Sony lab said at an open house here last month.

Much as these communities of "agents" extract meaning (semantics) from the character of their interactions, emergent semantics extracts the meaning of Web documents from the manner in which people use them, the researchers said. Based on just-patented emergent-semantics principles for its robots, the Sony scheme harnesses the human communication and social interaction among peer-to-peer file sharers, database searchers and content creators to append the semantic dimension to the Web automatically, instead of depending on the owner of each piece of data to tag it.

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