The Semantic + Pragmatic Web = The Semiotic Web

The desideratum for the concept of a semiotic web is proposed. It combines both the recent semantic web and the pragmatic web initiatives but surpasses them in being faithful to Charles S. Peirce’s pragmatic approach to inquiry. I will address some conceptual shortcomings of the semantic and pragmatic web proposals, and suggest that in a semiotic web, one can to operationalise its basic ideas in an effective way. Accordingly, a foundational approach to multi-agent systems is proposed that goes beyond both semantic and pragmatic notions by employing a logic of questioning and answering, and by taking agents as roles in a dialogical semiotic inquiry of all signs mediated in the universe of the web. The outcome is that in the web realm, semantic and pragmatic elements cannot and should not be separated from each other, and that their merger has significant emergent properties matching Peirce’s sign theory.