Sociological ontology of the digital public sphere: the case of Web 2.0/3.0 Pedro Andrade pjoandrade@gmail.com Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Sociedade Abstract Digital public sphere is immersed in the present conjuncture of accelerated transformation and probable rupture, which certainly will affect the way we exercise our citizenship in contempo- rary times. This social and political tsunami is partly based on the change of paradigm of Web 2.0 or Social Web to Web 3.0 or Semantic Web. To clarify such a process, this paper discusses some of the key issues and theoretical positions on public space, from seminal Habermas’s perspec- tive to new problematics raised by the networked society. The author suggests the construction of a Sociological Ontology of Social and Semantic Web, based on a Semantic-Logical Sociology and Methodology. These procedures are applied through the analysis and hermeneutics of a Wikipedia page entitled ‘Web 2.0’, where sociological experimental tools are used, as Semantic-Logical fields, trees and networks, central and peripheral concepts, and trichotomies. Keywords Digital public sphere; Sociological Ontology; Web 2.0/3.0; Semantic- Logical Sociology/Metodology; trichotomies 1. Introduction The public sphere has been problematized in recent years, in particular in an at- tempt to meet the new needs emerging within the network society. In this new social par- adigm, the public sphere, in some of its traits, is reconverted into a digital public sphere. However, this concept is susceptible to ambiguities, acquiring different meanings within the Internet in general, or specifically inside the Web 2.0 or Web 3.0. It is known that Web 2.0 (also named Social Web), developed in the first decade of the 3rd millennium, allows more active activities and strategies by the cyberspace user, when compared to the initial period of the Internet, during the last decade of the twenti- eth century, which some authors came to call ‘Web 1.0’. In the Social Web, the user is not limited to retrieve information but also writes it, and does so especially in the context of social networks, eg. Twitter or Facebook. For its part, in Web 3.0 or Semantic Web, internet sites or other virtual places in- clude not only information, but focus essentially on knowledge. In other words, the infor- mation provided by producers and writers of a digital site inside the Semantic Web, is not primarily presented in a somewhat descriptive way, as in previous information systems. In addition, in a Web 3.0 site, there is the concern to provide explanations, clarifications and interpretations about the content, in order to turn it into knowledge which can be shared globally in a more effective manner. Comunicação e Sociedade, vol. 23, 2013, pp. 202 – 216