Where Are The Semantics In The Semantic Web? / quote 2 of 29
Hardwired semantics versus public semantics
The general case of automatically determining the meaning of Web content is somewhere between intractable and impossible. Thus, a human will always be hardwiring some of the semantics into Web applications. The question is what is hardwired and what is not? The shopping agent applications essentially hardwire the meaning of all the terms and procedures. The hardwiring enables the machine to “know” how to use the content. The hardwiring approach is not robust to changes in Web content. [...] The alternative to hardwiring is allowing the machine to process the semantics specifications directly. [...] In these cases, instead of hardwiring the semantics of the terms representing Web content, the semantics of the representation languages are made public and hardwired into the inference engines used by the applications.