The existing, open Worldwide Web has been successful on a global
scale because the cost of participation at a basic level is low and the
individual benefit of participation is immediate, rising rapidly as
more participants take part. The same cannot currently be said
about
systems relying on formal representations of semantics of Web
components because the cost of being precise about semantics for
sophisticated components is prohibitively high and the cost of ensuring
an individual, absolute semantics for a component rises rapidly as more
participants take part. I shall describe a project -
OpenKnowledge -
that aims to break out of this deadlock by focusing on semantics
related to interaction (which are acquired at low cost during
participation) and uses this to avoid dependency on a priori semantic
agreement; instead making semantic commitments incrementally at run
time. The "Open" in OpenKnowledge thus is significant in two
senses:
it assumes an open system, which anyone may join at any time; it
assumes an openness to being joined, achieved through participation at
low individual cost. I shall discuss how we intend to build this
sort
of system.