Semantics of What

Semantic interoperability is a noble and important goal, but hard to pin down, for several reasons: the notion itself is somewhat redundant, its meaning is elusive as is that of its parts (semantics, interoperability), there is no commonly accepted formal definition, there are no benchmarks and no agreed challenges, the role of humans in the loop is unclear, and the acronym inflation around the semantic web obscures rather than highlights many research issues. As a consequence, semantic interoperability research often doesn’t know where to start from, where to go, and how to get there. This position paper tries to determine a starting point of the research by asking “what is it that needs to be semantically defined in order to support semantic interoperability?” The intention is to encourage more precise problem statements in semantic interoperability research.