caa a22 4500 445838299 CHVBK 20180317145336.0 cr unu---uuuuu 170323e20110501xx s 000 0 eng 10.1007/s11023-011-9230-6 doi (NATIONALLICENCE)springer-10.1007/s11023-011-9230-6 Halpin Harry School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, 10 Crichton Street, EH8 9AB, Edinburgh, UK aut Sense and Reference on the Web [Elektronische Daten] [Harry Halpin] We examine a crucial question for the World Wide Web: What does a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) mean? Crucial for the next-generation Semantic Web, can it refer to things outside web-pages? The Web is a universal information space for naming and accessing information via URIs. However, the classical philosophical problems of meaning and reference that have been the source of debate within the philosophy of language return when the Web is given as the foundation for a knowledge representation with the Semantic Web. Debates on the Semantic Web about the meaning and referential status of a URI are explored as analogues to debates about the meaning and reference of names in the philosophy of language. Three main positions are inspected: the logical position, as exemplified by the descriptivist theory of reference, the direct reference position, as exemplified by Putnam and Kripke's causal theory of reference, and a Wittgensteinian position that views URIs as a public language, as exemplified by Web search engines. These positions show that debates within the philosophy of language are alive and well on the Web, and so in the philosophy of computer science. Springer Science+Business Media B.V., 2011 Knowledge representation nationallicence Philosophy of language nationallicence World Wide Web nationallicence URI nationallicence Semantic Web nationallicence Minds and Machines Springer Netherlands 21/2(2011-05-01), 153-178 0924-6495 21:2<153 2011 21 11023 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-011-9230-6 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-011-9230-6 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Halpin Harry School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, 10 Crichton Street, EH8 9AB, Edinburgh, UK aut NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Minds and Machines Springer Netherlands 21/2(2011-05-01), 153-178 0924-6495 21:2<153 2011 21 11023 Metadata rights reserved Springer special CC-BY-NC licence nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-springer