Third SIGSEMIS

Volume 1, Issue 3 (PDF) "For the third time AIS SIGSEMIS bulletin is in your hands. Many interesting articles, a featured interview with Tom Gruber, our regular columns as well as several interesting announcements are waiting for your attention."

Interview with Tom Gruber: "In fact, the World Wide Web is based on a semiformal ontology, and it shows how ontological commitment works in software interoperability. At its core, the concept of the hyperlink is based on an ontological commitment to object identity. In order to hyperlink to an object requires that there be a stable notion of object and that its identity doesn’t depend on context (which page I am on now, or time, or who I am). Most of the machinery of the early Web standards are specifications of what can be an object with identity, and how to identify it independently of context. These standards documents serve as ontologies – specifications of the concepts that you need to commit to if you want to play fairly on the Web. If one built a system with these commitments, all of the web infrastructure works well."

"Intraspect was designed on the assumption that it is more valuable to get evidence of human knowledge into a collective memory than to add structure to existing online material. So we created technology that helped people work together on-line, and as a byproduct their work became available for discovery using information retrieval technology."

Other interesting articles: "Component Requirements for a Universal Semantic Web Framework", "Elements of a First Visual Rule Language for the Semantic Web" (about REWERSE), "Response Management in Multidimensional Web Information Systems", "The Semantic Web Trends in Brief", "Using e-business Registry / Repository for E-Health Semantics" and many others.