Distinguishing/Making Explicit. Web Ontology as Ontology of Operations

By taking seriously the “empirical metaphysics” contained in the architecture of the Web, our goal is to grasp the kind of entities it came to distinguish. Yet, such distinctions are not understood as classical philosophical distinctions. Indeed, the work accomplished by the Web architects belongs to engineering. For that reason, we outline a processually-based approach to ontology. It embeds the very operations of distinction and explicitation through which ontological types are made to emerge. We then relate this first sketch to a variety of examples picked up from the first part, dealing with folksonomies, computer ontologies and the very principles behind the architecture of the Web. Therefrom, we take into account the plurality of the modes of access on the Web on a broader scale in order to extend our previous developments on the ontological dynamics though which new distinctions are made explicit. A model is laid down which draws from Robert Stalnaker’s two-dimensional semantics, generalized on a multi-dimensional level and reshaped so as to escape the exclusive focus on the notion of truth.