Semantic Webs and TUNES

[Brian Rice]

First of all, let me say that this is both a side note and central to 
our understanding of what we are doing.

Tim Berners-Lee and fellows have been working on this idea called a 
Semantic Web, presenting the idea in an overview at 
http://www.scientificamerican.com/2001/0501issue/0501berners-lee.html

Note in particular that they distinguish philosophical ontologies 
from their own use of it (the common one of the 
knowledge-representation community), which Arrow does not do.

Now, Slashdot being the kind of forum it is, picks up on this and 
discusses. I consider it worthwhile only as a poll of sorts of the 
kind of people we eventually have to deal with as our context. 
(Remember that the non-programming community sees much more of them 
than they do of us). At any rate, within the discussion following:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=01%2F04%2F10%2F2023246&cid=&pid=0&startat=&threshold=2&mode=thread&commentsort=0&op=Change

Within that, there is an interesting comment from a person who's been 
involved in this kind of thing:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=01/04/10/2023246&threshold=2&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=28

Inside of this he mentions relational programming and many other 
things, relating a lot of different pieces of small history to the 
big picture behind (or around) this thing. This struck me a bit as 
Arrow does address relational programming at a fairly early stage 
(the application of graphs to arrows).

In TUNES vs. the World-Wide Web 
(http://tunes.org/Interfaces/tunesvswww.html) and of course the whole 
Interfaces sub-project (http://tunes.org/Interfaces), we could 
address this fairly effectively using such an approach. There's a 
hell of a lot I could get into on this, but it's not time. I do 
recall a paper on using graph notation and theory to describe 
ontologies (the philosophical ones) for user-interface management.

Thanks,
~