Meaning Negotiation: an invitation

The development of distributed applications over large networks of computers raises the issue of semantic heterogeneity between autonomously developed sources of information or service providers. If, on the one hand, it is generally recognized that we need a semantic layer to provide more and more complex services, on the other hand it is clear that such a layer requires the ability to “bridge” (interoperate) representations whose heterogeneity is much deeper than that of syntactic formats. As a matter of fact, different people (individuals, groups, communities, service providers, corporations, and so on) view – and thus represent – the world from different perspectives, using different interpretation schemas, having different goals in mind. This diversity of viewpoints is the real source of semantic heterogeneity; it is intrinsic of the way cognitive agents (in particular, human beings) know the world, and as such it cannot be wiped away. Semantic heterogeneity manifests itself in different forms. Simple examples are: