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