Semiotics and Internet of Things

I first had to find out about Semiotics before I could participate in the Panel on "Semiotics and Informatics: Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics of Knowledge Management in a Social Context" at IC3K'12 conference in Barcelona.
I was really curious about how semiotics - studying about properties and functions of sign - could be applied to guide interpretation of phenomena in context. Kecheng Liu illustrated how different semiosis between system user and system analysist can create a gap of understanding which may cause many IT projects to fail.
In my contribution I proposed to apply Semiotics for interpreting things as parts of situations and contexts of use. Furthermore, by analyzing available Master Data of products Semiotics could help to derive possible uses of objects which could instruct robots about how to use those - as an alternative to ontologies.
Finally, in I used the opportunity in my keynote to draw the attention of knowledge management to thing-generation data (in addition to people-generated they work on today).

Internet of Things – Towards New Frontiers of Knowledge Management on Prezi

I also liked the Barcelo Sants hotel which clearly relyed on Semiotics to be make you feel being in space ship....