To Martin, more on the unbearable inevitability of discretization

These are additional details, inspired by Martin Lessard's comments .

I don't think you are too liberal artistically to use my semantic web search engine, as you so kindly put it. ;-) I don't think pre-empirical sciences (i.e. literature, theology, politics, etc.) can't benefit from a not-so-distant, intelligent semantic web. I even believe that they will be able to use it with no more technology than the rational users require. What I do believe (and meant) is :

• A semantic web query engine able to identify from free, unstructured, unindexed, markup-less text, poems that have bird as metaphor for freedom is not simply intelligent, but also more intelligent than the vast majority of humans at this very task.
• A query like get all the poems that have bird as a metaphor for freedom can mean anything from get all the poems that were intended to have bird as a metaphor for freedom to get all the poems that could be understood to have bird as a metaphor for freedom, at some point in time (100 years ago?, now?, 100 years from now?). Such a query cannot logically discriminate any text that has bird in it. What you want, then, is for the engine to assume the intent of the user from use case statistical inference, which is pretty easy to do. But you also induce the user in error on the correct meaning of poem that have bird as a metaphor for freedom, for which the correct answer is any text, in any language, that refers to birds. Just like the pre-CSS graphic designers used HTML table positioning, your usage of the semantic web is wrong, as far as semiotics go. A rational query would be get all text that have been identified as poems and have been said to use birds as a metaphor for freedom which is an extremely easy thing to parse and process.
• The mathematical newspeak does not reduce expressiveness (whatever that means). On the contrary, it significantly increases communication efficiency.
• If the minimal standard set (TCP/IP, HTTP and Unicode) is universal enough for you, the semantic web cannot be considered to be intrinsically fragmented : it is rather a uniform cyber-representation of a fragmented world. In the worst-case scenario, cross-fragment semiosis is always possible through ontological harmonization, which also seems to be mechanizable.

All in all, for a query such as what does God want me to do now? I would prefer my query engine to answer go get laid than according to the Bible....