pragmatic_web

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Pragmatic Web
This page http://tagunity.wikispaces.com/pragmatic_web DRAFT 1161149528

The 'Pragmatic Web' is a vision for enabling //what//?

Munindar Singh offers: > The best hope for the semantic web is to encourage the emergence of **communities of** interest and **practice** that develop their own consensus knowledge on the basis of which they will standardize their representations. For example, such standards have emerged in narrow areas of personal information management PIM], e.g., with the vCard standard. Such standards have also emerged in the handling of email attachments. (Singh, 2002, intro. sect., emphasis added)

Singh emphasises that "if there is one lesson to be learned from the long history of databases, it is that it is practically impossible to describe data well enough for it to be used in arbitrary applications," and he believes that "The current hype surrounding the semantic web is reminiscent of previous hype cycles associated with artificial intelligence (AI). ... [based on dreamp up] scenarios where the semantic web could change how information on the web is prepared and used. ... However, when the scenarios are put together and expected to be automated based on general-purpose representations, they pose a huge engineering challenge, especially because current abstractions and theories are quite limited," (Singh, 2002, intro. sect.).

Singh's sentiments echo those more recently outlined by Peter Morville (2005) in his vision for a sociosemantic Web.

Singh is critical of current approaches (circa. 2001), since they "carry the bagage of traditional distributed objects approaches," with the "essential assumption that [Semantic Web] services can be described in an manner that is independent of how they are used" (2001, sect. 3.1).

Singh proposes that in real liFe, consumers of on-line information services need to discover services that they find trustworth in their own way.

Principles of a pragmatic web
Singh, 2001, sect. 3.2 e.g. "//User before provider//". This principle involves a shift in focus from listing the offerings of a service's provider, to modelling the needs of the service's consumer, and the assumption that the consumers needs are "potentially quite idiosyncratice", and rather "context dependent," (Singh, 2001, sect. 3.2)

Another principle is "//Interaction before representation//" (Singh, 2001, sect. 3.2), that is hiding data structure that are not relevent to the context of the task at hand.

Interernal links

 * //to add//