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

["Andrew S. Townley" <andrew.townley@bearingpoint.com>]

On Fri, 2006-02-24 at 16:08, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
> 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.

While it may not have been clear from what I said earlier, I understand
what you're saying here.  I was just trying to make the point that there
are times when a discovery process of this nature won't fly because of
the type of your application or your security requirements (not very
well, apparently ;).

> 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.

Yes, but you're working from the premise that the Semantic Web of
everything on the planet is a fundamentally good idea.  I can see some
of the merits, but I'm not 100% convinced that there shouldn't be
different strata, perhaps orthogonal, and that this isn't ok.  Society,
and even information/representations, need to have some clear
delineations at times.

Isn't it being pragmatic to realize that you can exert some control and
structure over a particular corner, and then define how that does (or
doesn't) relate to the rest of the universe?  Or, maybe if the semantics
can be identified, then an agreement on the invocation mechanism can be
achieved?  Maybe not.  If not, then don't you risk diluting the
semantics so much that they become meaningless and you're searching for
something else.  You allude to this type of problem with your document
example below.

> 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".

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