Kashori - Semantics for Social Agents

Semantics for Agents

Saturday, September 27, 2003

W3C Thinks About the Meaning of URIs 

An interesting issue in the work to develop the Semantic Web is the relationship between the Meaning of a URI in an RDF document, where it is used as a logical constant, and it's use on the Web, where it is an identifier that, when used as a parameter to a HTTP GET function, will return information to the caller of the function. The problem is that as a formal system of logical assertions, many think that the use of URIs in RDF is only as names or as unique markers for individuals, and, as such, have no need or use or even advantage in being also an identifier on the web. To others, using URIs for names in the Semantic Web is critically important and provides a vital connection between the web and the statements made in the Semantic Web.

When used in an RDF document, a URI can be defined by referencing an ontology and stating that the URI is a type of a class within this ontology.

URIs are created by the owners of web sites. After first being created, they mean nothing. It is up to the owner/creator to assert the meaning of the URI by defining its type. How should this best be done? This is one of many questions being asked by this task force of the W3C.

In a recent thread, this and other questions are debated. Here is one of the emails, Re: Proposed issue: What does using an URI require of me and my software? from pat hayes on 2003-09-26 (public-sw-meaning@w3.org from September 2003). I think this may be better stated as, "How best may my software and I exploit the URIs that I use?"

# posted by John Black @ 10:21 PM
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Friday, September 26, 2003

Service Providers 

No one wants applications, they were an artifact of the software industry. Who ever wanted to maintain a hard disk? Or do updates on a software application? What do I need an "application" for anyway? What I need is a service performed for me. I want to design processes that will take care of my needs, and for that I need access to services.

# posted by John Black @ 10:08 PM
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Wednesday, September 24, 2003

Distributed Composite Application Architectures 

There is a new paradigm developing about software development. Where in the past, developers linked together calls to lower level libraries of routines, now we do almost the same thing with distributed services. To support this activity, OASIS Forms Web Services Composite Application Framework Technical Committee to develop a standard for "coordination, context, and transaction mechanisms."

# posted by John Black @ 9:37 PM
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Author

• John Black

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"We are in the habit, I take it, of positing a single idea or form in the case of the various multiplicities to which we give the same name. Do you not understand?" "I do." "In the present case, then, let us take any multiplicity you please; for example, there are many couches and tables." "Of course." "But these utensils imply, I suppose, only two ideas or forms, one of a couch and one of a table." "Yes." "And are we not also in the habit of saying that the craftsman who produces either of them fixes his eyes on the idea or form, and so makes in the one case the couches and in the other the tables that we use, and similarly of other things? For surely no craftsman makes the idea itself. How could he?" "By no means."
Plato, Republic X, page 596a

"This convention is not of the nature of a promise: For even promises themselves, as we shall see afterwards, arise from human conventions. It is only a general sense of common interest; which sense all the members of the society express to one another, and which induces them to regulate their conduct by certain rules. I observe, that it will be for my interest to leave another in the possession of his goods, provided he will act in the same manner with regard to me. He is sensible of a like interest in the regulation of his conduct. When this common sense of interest is mutually expressed, and is known to both, it produces a suitable resolution and behaviour. And this may properly enough be called a convention or agreement betwixt us, though without the interposition of a promise; since the actions of each of us have a reference to those of the other, and are performed upon the supposition, that something is to be performed on the other part. Two men, who pull the oars of a boat, do it by an agreement or convention, though they have never given promises to each other. Nor is the rule concerning the stability of possession the less derived from human conventions, that it arises gradually, and acquires force by a slow progression, and. by our repeated experience of the inconveniences of transgressing it. On the contrary, this experience assures us still more, that the sense of interest has become common to all our fellows, and gives us a confidence of the future regularity of their conduct: And it is only on the expectation of this, that our moderation and abstinence are founded. In like manner are languages gradually established by human conventions without any promise. ..." - A Treatise of Human Nature, Chapter 74 by David Hume

"...Semeiotike, or the doctrine of signs; the most usual whereof being words, it is aptly enough termed also Logike, logic: the business whereof is to consider the nature of signs, the mind makes use of for the understanding of things, or conveying its knowledge to others. For, since the things the mind contemplates are none of them, besides itself, present to the understanding, it is necessary that something else, as a sign or representation of the thing it considers, should be present to it: and these are ideas. And because the scene of ideas that makes one man's thoughts cannot be laid open to the immediate view of another, nor laid up anywhere but in the memory, a no very sure repository: therefore to communicate our thoughts to one another, as well as record them for our own use, signs of our ideas are also necessary: those which men have found most convenient, and therefore generally make use of, are articulate sounds. The consideration, then, of ideas and words as the great instruments of knowledge, makes no despicable part of their contemplation who would take a view of human knowledge in the whole extent of it. And perhaps if they were distinctly weighed, and duly considered, they would afford us another sort of logic and critic, than what we have been hitherto acquainted with." - AN ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING by John Locke 1690