Bibliothèque nationale de France

This is one of the most historic, most beautiful libraries in the modern world. Tracing its origin to the royal library founded at the Louvre by Charles V in 1368, the Bibliothèque nationale de France expanded under Louis XIV and opened to the public in 1692. With library's collections swelling to over 300,000 volumes during the radical phase of the French Revolution when the private libraries of aristocrats and clergy were seized, the library became the Imperial National Library and in 1868 was moved to newly constructed buildings on the Rue de Richelieu following a series of regime changes in France. At one time or another - 1896 to be exact - the library was in fact the largest repository of books in the world.

Boston Public Library

Historical Boston is one of the most beautiful, but underrated cities in the world. Likewise its library system. Founded in the mid-19th century, the Boston Public Library (BPL) is strongly associated with the emergence of education for the working class. Its unique architectural style was maintained when Philip John designed an additional section in 1972. Serving as both a research library and headquarters for Boston Public Library's 26 branch libraries, the main library branch also holds a large collection of rare books and manuscripts and musical scores.

Semiotics and the Semantic Web

. . . when computing entered the realm of images, a new dimension was added to cyperspace (taking it literally from 1D to 2D) and the term 'virtual reality' started to be more than a daydream. (Cadognety, 2002).

According to Wikipedia, semiotics is the study of sign processes (semiosis), or signification and communication, signs and symbols. What is interesting is that there is currently a great deal of research on semiotics and the Web, and a result, have an important natural link to the semantic web. Anything intended to signal meaning of some kind, signs on websites are especially important. Various kinds of meaning can be transmitted or 'signalled' by using an image, icon, label or a hyperlink of some fashion -- signs. According to the semiotic theory, signs have a significant (e.g. link label), a referent (e.g. actual page the link points to), an interpretant (e.g. the concept it signifies), and even a behaviour (e.g. the link mechanism itself). Signs of all types leverage existing content to express some kind of function (e.g. a thumbnail image used as link to a product) or affordance.

Philippe Codognet has been one of the preeminent researchers in the field of the semiotics of the web. In his article in 2002, Ancient Images and New Technologies: The Semiotics of the Web, when the web was still in its infancy, Codognet points out that indexical images, which we use in navigating the multimedia documents which make up the web, can be based on the study of semiotics, and can be traced back to the classical thinkers such as Gottfried Liebniz and C.S. Peirce. In other words, instead of viewing the Semantic Web as something entirely novel, we must look at the core roots of the web, which is really just an organization of data, documents, and images - conceptually meshed in contemporary computer-based communication.