A Soft Semantic Web

The importance of automated meaning handling in the Internet has been widely acknowledged; this is indeed the rational behind initiatives like the so-called "semantic Web", which proposes the widespread use of "ontologies" to define concepts and make online documentation self-described. Nevertheless, several practical problems have hindered the semantic Web from becoming mainstream. In this paper we propose a way to make explicit the underlying semantic structure of the ordinary (HTML-based) Web, by measuring joint keyword occurrences in Web pages, around our notion of "semantic contexts". The resulting infrastructure semantically characterizes contextual semantic information in the Internet. Semantic contexts can have many practical uses, such as focusing Internet searches in such a way that results are much more relevant to users than with current search engines, as we show in this paper. Further, we propose to make semantic contexts publicly available online, in order to make semantic-aware many Internet applications in a simpler way than -or even better, complementing - the currently marginal semantic Web