COW: Consumer Ontology Web vs. CCKW: Consumer-Centric Knowledge Web

As I continue to work on my white paper entitled "The Consumer-Centric Knowledge Web - A Vision of Consumer Applications of Software Agent Technology - Enabling Consumer-Centric Knowledge-Based Computing", I also continue to struggle with how to crisply refer to it. Consumer-Centric Knowledge Web (CCKW) is a bit wordy and not very memorable. Even Consumer Knowledge Web (CKW) still isn't "there".

My latest rendition is to call it the Consumer Ontology Web (COW). That has the disadvantage that nobody knows what an ontology really is (including most of the people working with the W3C and the Semantic Web, unfortunately), but at least COW is memorable and might inspire a sense of curiosity and get people to ask "Well, so what does the 'O' in 'COW' really mean?"

Hey, it least it might be a great conversation starter... "I'm working on a COW." Or, "My goal is that some day everybody will have a COW, and be happy about it."

I'm thinking that maybe the COW could be the underlying infrastructure, the real ontology on which the higher-level, consumer-oriented knowledge management and user interface layers operate.

Or, maybe the COW is the sum total of all of the interacting software agents that are needed to really make a distributed ontology fly.

I have mixed feelings about this new name for my vision... any thoughts?

-- Jack Krupansky