Abstract
Nowadays, the Web is formed by two types of content which are linked: structured data of the so-called Semantic Web and users’ contributions of the Social Web. The ViewpointS approach was de-signed as an integrative formalism capable of mixing these two types of content while preserving the subjectivity of the interactions of the Social Web. ViewpointS is a subjective knowledge repre-sention approach. Knowledge is represented by means of viewpoints which are micro-expressions of individual semantics tying the relation between two Web resources. The approach also provides a second level of subjectivity. Indeed, the viewpoints can be interpreted differently according to the user through the perspective mechanism. In addition to a top-down approach where collective semantics of a group is established by consensus, collective semantics of a ViewpointS community is emerging from the exchange and confrontation of viewpoints and evolve fluidly. In our frame-work, resources from the Web are tied by viewpoints in a Knowledge Graph. From the Knowledge Graph containing viewpoints and Web resources a Knowledge Map consisting of “synapses” and re-sources is created as a result of the interpretation and aggregation of viewpoints. The evolution of the ViewpointS synapses may be considered analog to the ones in the brain in the very simple sense that each viewpoint contributes to the establishment, strengthening or weakening of a syn-apse that connects two resources. The exchange of viewpoints is the selection process ruling the synapses evolution like the selectionist process within the brain.We investigate in this study the potential impact of our subjective representation of knowledge in various fields: information search, recommendation, multilingual ontology alignment and methods for calculating semantic distances.