Modeling Social Attitudes on the Web

This paper argues that in order to allow for the representation, comparison and assessment of possibly controversial or uncertain information on the web, the semantic web effort requires capabilities for the social reasoning about web ontologies and other information acquired from multiple heterogeneous sources. As an approach to this, we propose formal means for the representation of possibly controversial opinions of groups and individuals, and of several other social attitudes regarding information on the web. Doing so, we integrate concepts from distributed artificial intelligence with approaches to web semantics, aiming for a social semantics of web content.