Viewpoints on Emergent Semantics

Location-aware social network services are set to be the next generation of social networking services. These services typically allow users to send and receive messages and icons. Iconic signs, which look like what they represent, may be said to have a commonly understood meaning attached to them. However, this is fluid, leaving them open to variation in meaning. More precise meanings are free to emerge within specific contexts and within particular social networks. Within this chapter the authors explore the semantics that emerge for three icons used within a location-aware social network service. Using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), focus is given to the dominant speech function attached to each icon and the resultant meanings that emerge within social networks of the systems users. This study allows the authors to better understand how users interact with each other in smart spaces and utilise location information in social network services. By understanding how icons are used to engage others and how the meanings attached to these icons develop, the authors are better placed to create systems that fit naturally and beneficially into the users’ context.

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Emergent Semantics

Managing Multimedia Semantics ◽

10.4018/978-1-59140-569-6.ch015 ◽

2011 ◽

pp. 351-362

Author(s):

Viranga Ratnaike ◽

Bala Srinivasan ◽

Surya Nepal

Keyword(s):

Information Retrieval ◽

Multimedia Information ◽

Semantic Gap ◽

Multimedia Information Retrieval ◽

Sensory Data ◽

The Past ◽

Multimedia Semantics ◽

Emergent Systems ◽

Semantic Models ◽

Emergent Semantics

The semantic gap is recognized as one of the major problems in managing multimedia semantics. It is the gap between sensory data and semantic models. Often the sensory data and associated context compose situations which have not been anticipated by system architects. Emergence is a phenomenon that can be employed to deal with such unanticipated situations. In the past, researchers and practitioners paid little attention to applying the concepts of emergence to multimedia information retrieval. Recently, there have been attempts to use emergent semantics as a way of dealing with the semantic gap. This chapter aims to provide an overview of the field as it applies to multimedia. We begin with the concepts behind emergence, cover the requirements of emergent systems, and survey the existing body of research.

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