The relation of encyclopedias with the indexes and the semantic Web: Organization and signification supports in postmodernity

Abstract The study aims to study the process of signification (or “semantization”) that occurs in cyberspace, especially through Wikipedia, the semantic web and Knowledge Databases as Freebase and DBpedia, to name the most important ones, modeling data with Resource Description Framework. Through documentary research review, we sought to understand this movement that builds, in cyberspace, a network or web of significations to be retrieved, activated and interpreted by machines and humans. From the theoretical corpus analysis, we can see the design of encyclopedia as Education, then as a repertoire of knowledge, in the classical world and as a reference work, in modernity. In postmodernity it gets a new plane of consistency, as semantic organization of knowledge and as a database. In cyberspace, contemporary indexes and Wikipedia are a corpus in continuous renewal and expansion and are interconnected by semantic metadata representation, which fill the corpus of knowledge databases readable by intelligent agents. These relationships reframe concepts of encyclopedia, indexes and even Semantics, showing machinic and hybrids assemblages of the organization and signification processes in postmodernity.