Active Knowledge Systems for the Pragmatic Web

As the limitations of the Semantic Web become apparent, the next step – creating the Pragmatic Web – requires active knowledge systems, that have the capability to support practical and complex human interaction and communication. A key ingredient in this effort is a system’s ability to respond to events in the real world. The Pragmatic Web would therefore not be merely a knowledge interchange medium; it would actively support humans using that knowledge to accomplish tasks. The main goal of this paper is to show how an active knowledge system can support formal models of human pragmatic communication, combining earlier work on active knowledge systems, formal models of communication acts and formal models of organizational actors. We carry through an extended example illustrating some of these ideas.