Meaning Of Meaning

very good

I could not get into this book. It was boring.

I first encountered reference to this book when reading about the semantic web. The key innovation was the "semiotic triangle" where we are encouraged to think of things, thoughts and symbols in separate and distinct domains. I now use the "semantic triangle" (a more approachable name) in many of my semantic web training classes. The key concept to get across to students is that when computers need to communicate, there are many limitations when using symbols alone, which can have many different meaning within different contexts. For example the word "run" has over 50 different meanings according to WordNet. A more robust way to exchange information between computers is to associate data elements with concepts. This books was one of the first books to build these models of communication.

I read this book years ago when I was really into this area. Very good and thought provoking discussion of ideas and problem we rarely think about, although we use language every day.