RE: [xml-dev] Mailmen, POST, Intent, and Duck Typing

["Bullard, Claude L \(Len\)" <len.bullard@intergraph.com>]

As I recall, the reason for UDDI and other discovery processes is 
to provide a facade of what is public knowledge so that one can 
then begin a negotiation to get more private knowledge, therefore, 
establish a relationship.  Typical contracting works like that 
and I won't get into details here.

Pragmatics takes up that aspect of communication.  Ontologies are 
a way to get that done but there is no free semantic lunch.  Standard 
ontologies are one answer, but you'll find the debate about the 
uppermost ontology to be fatiguing.   When you look into business 
intelligence systems (eg, applications of OLAP cubes vs massive 
indexing over distributed resources), you will find the ontology 
challenge yet again.   What I am still sorting out is if there 
is a clean separation of the pragmatic and the semantic layer. 
I sort of doubt it but I'm still learning.

On the other hand, except for methods, it can be hard to tell 
the difference between a document and an object even if you 
can tell the difference between an object and data.  That means 
document is overloaded and ambiguous, so it is a classic 
term that exists in superposition until measured.  The point 
of pragmatics, I guess, is a formal means to establish a protocol 
of measures, aka, "right rock; wrong rock".

len