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Extensible Markup Language, Comments, and Communication

Abstract

By defining the content of formal ontologies, we can determine, for the ontology, the truth value of any statement that refers to, or does not refer to, that content. This is not possible for all XML documents. The main reason for this is that, unlike ontologies, XML does not inherently embrace any principle for handling known and unknown information as a metalanguage. This allows the application of different principles to the same XML document, which generate different interpretations of it, thereby undermining the communication between people and software applications that XML, like ontologies, is supposed to support. In this paper, I propose a solution for XML documents to come close to achieving the same result as ontologies: including comments that contain principles for handling known and unknown information. In demonstrating that this solution works only under very specific circumstances, I also focus on the communication that ontologies and XML documents are intended to support, highlighting the different roles they assign to the subjects engaging with their content: spectators and interpreters, respectively. More specifically, I argue that the fact that the subjects (whether people or software applications) have ultimate authority over the interpretation of XML documents renders the documents hermeneutically unstable – an instability that even the inclusion of a comment specifying a principle for handling known and unknown information shifts rather than definitively resolves.