Teodora Petkova

Weaving Texts into the Semantic Web

The Interconnectedness within

Intertextuality is a term coined in 1966 referring to texts being shaped and influenced by other texts. The way I see it, this concept reaches as far as our digital state of existence today.

Everything is connected. Every text, every thread in a conversation (be it direct or indirect, through references) starts and ends in and with another text or thread. We are never-ending stories reaching out to find possible continuations.

I find the analogy between humans and texts very useful as a means for understanding our networked life. And by using the concept of text I refer to any symbolic representation of shared meaning.

For so long texts have been our main source and at the same time tool for passing on meaning and insights through time and space. Today this vehicle of traditions is being entirely logged, archived and digitized, creating a huge corpus of texts that are available to search through, enjoy, compare and most importantly enrich with new meanings and relationships.

Posts in this category:

The Intertextual Animal [Book Excerpt]

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Consider this. I am the sum of my readings, my immediate surroundings and my experiences. I am also what I write and read on the Web. I constantly transverse analog and digital realms, textual and non-textual fabrics. Such dynamics helps me enrich my life and the Web with an expanded field of relationships where newlyContinue Weaving

Linked Data and the Good Text [Book Excerpt]

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In his “Lecture on Ethics”, Wittgenstein writes that the good way can only be conceived within the context of its goal. The direction Wittgenstein gives is solid – good is what works, what serves a certain purpose. Leveraging this Wittgenstein’s proposition, I argue that the good text on the Web is the connected text. AndContinue Weaving

Knowledge Soup for the Soul

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Thinking about how digital texts fit into the bigger picture of us building richly interconnected informational spaces to embed knowledge in them, I ended up before a knowledge soup. Knowledge Representation and a Soup It is in The Challenge of Knowledge Soup where computer scientist John F. Sowa writes about knowledge and how difficult itContinue Weaving