Introduction

I am a software architect, engineer, and programmer.  My interest in these 
ideas began almost 20 years ago when I came across John Sowa's book on
Conceptual Structures.  I thought then that a network of meaning 
represented as graphs was an exciting possibility.  About 10 years later 
I had implemented a portion of his graph language in Prolog and was 
beginning to apply it to business problems.  In 1997, I worked with him 
on a mailing list as he developed a proposed ANSI standard of a linear 
form of conceptual graphs[1].

In my work at the time, I realized that the individuals defined in a set of
graphs were key to expanding the network of meaning.  But this would only 
be true if every creator and maintainer of graphs used the same set of 
individual markers to assert something about the individuals denoted by those
markers. It seemed to me that it was not enough to share a conceptual type 
lattice, we also needed a way to share a global set of identity markers.

CGIF did not grow as I would have liked, and in 1999, I learned about RDF. 
Now it seems that RDF, OWL, and the Semantic Web are the best hope to create 
a graphical network of logical assertions.  And URIs appear to be a set of 
globally unique names that I believe are essential.  

Now if the only function that URIs serve is to provide a globally agreed 
upon set of unique markers to a graphical semantic network, and the web only
provides the transport over which the graph grows, I think it would 
be a great thing.

But I am hoping that the connection created by using the Webs URIs as the 
Semantic Webs individual markers is more than that.


John Black

[1] http://users.bestweb.net/~sowa/cg/cgstandw.htm

Received on Sunday, 21 September 2003 22:41:11 UTC