Hybrid ontologies and social semantics

Semantic Web, Social Web, and new economic challenges are causing major shifts in the pervasive fabric that the internet has become, in particular for the business world. The internet's new role as participatory medium and its ubiquity lead to dense tri-sortal communities of humans and businesses mixed with computer systems, and semantically interoperating in a well-defined sense. Many of the challenges and ongoing (r)evolutions appear to produce as yet seemingly contradictory requirements and thus produce potentially very interesting research areas. We argue that linguistics, community-based real world “social” semantics and pragmatics, scalability, the tri-sortal nature of the communities involved, the balance between usability and reusability, and the methodological requirements for non-disruptive adoption by enterprises of the new technologies provide vectors for fundamental computer science research, for interesting new artefacts, and for new valorisations of enterprise interoperability. We posit that one such development will likely result in hybrid ontologies and their supporting social implementation environments -such as semantic wikis- that accommodate the duality and co-existence of formal reasoning requirements inside systems on the one hand and of declarative knowledge manipulation underlying human communication and agreement on the other hand.

I. Introduction

To state that the Web is turning pervasive and ubiquitous has become something of a platitude. As its density increases, perhaps it will soon be more appropriate to think of it as a tissue rather than a web, with warp and weft provided by numerous -meaningful- services connecting its three main sorts of nodes, computer systems, humans,¹

this sequence does not imply an order of importance, of course. But note that as active agents within the WWW, humans are in fact relative late-comers....

and businesses. Note that in stating it so we take the physical connectivity for granted; it is the existence of (computer-based) services between nodes that will determine the “real”, or if one wants, semantical topology of the “future” Internet of Everything. For this reason we will use the terms Internet and Web below as interchangeable except when referring to the Internet as merely the infrastructure. Note that by having enterprises as first class citizens one becomes motivated to make explicit concepts of group, organisation, community, business ecosystem etc. as modelling primitives leading to richer models than bi-sortal networks where businesses are represented by their human and system “components”.