Skip to main content

A Semantic Engagement

When someone says something to the effect “We will add Semantics and all your problems will be solved” the image that that conjures up for me is salt: “Let us sprinkle some Semantics and it will taste better”. And, yes, somehow, Semantics always seems to be capitalized.

Needless to say, I do not buy this for a couple of reasons:

  • Everything has some kind of semantics. It just may not be all that useful.

  • Any explicit representation of the semantic relationships becomes syntactical. Processing therefore becomes processing of structures; you are still writing regular code to do that processing.

  • There is no such thing as two people or agents having the same interpretation of a term. Oops, there goes all that Ontology stuff :) What a chair means to me is overlapping, but different to what it means to you. Even for me, the meaning depends on what I am trying to do (arrange them for dinner, sit on one, ship it and so on.).


Luckily, agreement on the meaning of a term is neither possible nor necessary. All that is needed is some form of congruence in the interpretations.

I think that the really important concept is “Semantic Engagement”. Or, in simple terms, “What it means to me at the moment”.

Semantic engagement is the relationship between an agent (software, person, whatever; but active) and some body of information that defines the agent's interpretation of that information.

For example, a Web browser's semantic engagement with information that is sucks in is founded on HTML: it understands HTML in order that it can display it; but does not generally understand what the HTML is for.

This applies to people as well as software. Just in case you thought that you always understand what something is for, just consider the last time that your eyes 'glazed over' some topic and you just let it wash over you. For most people, reading EULAs comes into that category.

Semantic Engagement is a useful concept because it limits what you have to do: in the formal setting of a software system you can often define pretty well what a particular module has to do. As in the case of the browser, it often amounts to a fairly shallow understanding of the information while anything deeper in the information is somehow transmitted further on to a different module/layer.

In the case of Ontologies, I believe that the implication is that you cannot separate semantics from intended purpose. Any ontology is a model; and to paraphrase

All ontologies are wrong, some are useful.

Popular posts from this blog

Minimum Viable Product

When was the last time you complained about the food in a restaurant? I thought so. Most people will complain if they are offended by the quality or service; but if the food and/or service is just underwhelming then they won't complain, they will simply not return to the restaurant. The same applies to software products, or to products of any kind. You will only get negative feedback from customers if they care enough to make the effort. In the meantime you are both losing out on opportunities and failing your core professional obligation. Minimum Viable Product speaks to a desire to make your customers design your product for you. But, to me, it represents a combination of an implicit insult and negligence. The insult is implicit in the term minimum. The image is one of laziness and contempt: just throw some mud on the wall and see if it sticks. Who cares about whether it meets a real need, or whether the customer is actually served. The negligence is more subtle but, in the end,

Comments Should be Meaningless

This is something of a counterintuitive idea: Comments should be meaningless What, I hear you ask, are you talking about? Comments should communicate to the reader! At least that is the received conventional wisdom handed does over the last few centuries (decades at least). Well, certainly, if you are programming in Assembler, or C, then yes, comments should convey meaning because the programming language cannot So, conversely, as a comment on the programming language itself, anytime the programmer feels the imperative to write a meaningful comment it is because the language is not able to convey the intent of the programmer. I have already noticed that I write far fewer comments in my Java programs than in my C programs.  That is because Java is able to capture more of my meaning and comments would be superfluous. So, if a language were able to capture all of my intentions, I would never need to write a comment. Hence the title of this blog.

In Praise of Crappy Code

Not all code needs to be perfect! This is pretty heretical thinking for a software engineer. The issue is simple: how do you go about developing software for a small fixed budget. Imagine that you have $500 to implement a solution to a problem. If you spend more than that you will never recoup the extra that you spent. This comes up a lot in systems integration scenarios and also in customization efforts. Someone wants you to 'tweak' an application that they are using; you know that no-one else would want that feature and that if you spend more than what the customer will pay you will end up losing money. From the customer's perspective, the common 'time and materials' approach to quoting for software development is a nightmare. Being able to offer a fixed price contract for a task is a big benefit for the customer. But, how much do you quote for? Too much and you scare the customer away. Too little and you lose money. This is where 'crappy code' com