Variation of meanings

Stephen Downes has a nice summary of the variation of meanings. It is valuable to have precise understandign of all these variations, especially for the Semantic Web researchers (or even developers).

Knowing exactly which type of semantics is modeling is a crucial demand to the Semantic Web ontology constructors. Many times the confusion is due to that we do not really understand these subtle distinctions among the meaning variations. For example, when modeling the domain of book,
    we need to specify the literal semantics if the goal is for linguistic parsing;
    we need to specify the semantic meaning if the goal is for library collection;
    we need to specify the pragmatic meaning if the goal is for book sale;
    we need to specify the intentional meaning is the goal is for capturing book review;
    we need to specify the social meaning is the goal is for book club;
    and so on...

The ontologists truly need to read this revelatory article, think of it hard, and read it again.