Consumer-Centric Knowledge Web

For the past few months I've been working on a white paper for something that I'm now calling the Consumer-Centric Knowledge Web. I still have a lot of work to do, but you can check out what I have completed so far. The full title is "The Consumer-Centric Knowledge Web - A Vision of Consumer Applications of Software Agent Technology - Enabling Consumer-Centric Knowledge-Based Computing".

My primary interest is software agent technology. I decided that consumer applications were where I really wanted to focus my attention. And I decided than knowledge-based applications would probably give consumers the best results.

Please note that my vision is for a research project and that the vision simply cannot be put toegther today using off-the-shelf components.

Let me know what you think.

-- Jack Krupansky

Defintion: Grounding

Anybody have a decent definition for the software use of the term "grounding"?

It is used and misused in a number of ways, so I may need to come up with my own definition.

At this stage, my understanding is that grounding is the process of determining the meaning of a concept. In other words, mapping concept to meaning. If I start with the word "cat", grounding is the process of gaining access to the meaning of the term or concept of "cat".

Some people in the semantic web services domain seem to use it as the mapping of an abstract interface into an actual implementation interface for a web service.

I suspect that my definition will have multiple senses to capture both valid uses and actual, common uses that may not be strictly correct.

A quick search of the W3C web site and Wikipedia and general web was not fruitful.

-- Jack Krupansky