The Pragmatic Web: Preliminary Thoughts
Munindar P. Singh · 2002
The core mission of the semantic web, namely, to enable information to be shared across the web, faces significant challenges. The challenges come from the difficulty of capturing semantics in a manner that is reusable across applications, the priority of process over data, the importance of interaction, and the critical need for accommodating user context. Overcoming these challenges takes us from the realm of semantics and brings us into the realm of pragmatics, which we view as supervenient upon the semantics. We claim that when the vision of the semantic web is realized, it will be via the pragmatic web. The ideas described herein have been in development for a few years. Most recently, this work was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant ITR-0081742 and by awards from IBM and Cisco. I have benefited from discussions with several colleagues and students, especially including Mike Huhns, Mladen Vouk, Bin Yu, Zhengang Cheng, Ashok Mallya, Mike Maximilien, Raghu Sreenath, and Pinar Yolum. Only I am responsible for the opinions expressed, of course.