The Birth of the New Web: A Foucauldian Reading of the Semantic Web

Foucault's The Birth of the Clinic serves as a pattern for understanding the paradigm shifts represented by the Semantic Web. Foucault presents the history of medical practice as a 3-stage sequence of transitions: from classificatory techniques to clinical strategies, and then to anatomico-pathological strategies. In this paper, the author removes these three stages both from their medical context and from Foucault's historical sequence, to produce a model for understanding information organization in the context of the Semantic Web. We can extract from Foucault's theory a triadic relationship between three interpretive strategies, all of them defined by their different relationships to a textual body: classification, description, and analysis. (C) 2007 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.