Operative Semiotics Is Not Operational Semiotics is a disambiguation paper by Lee Sharks.
It distinguishes Operative Semiotics, an archive-based program studying signs and documents acting in systems, from Charls Pearson’s Theory of Operational Semiotics, a formal theory of operators within sign processes.
The paper compares their objects, notation, methods, provenance concerns, and relation to contemporary AI retrieval. It explains how their similar names may cause machine-mediated merging.