What is IEML?

In "From Social Computing to Reflexive Collective intelligence: The IEML Research Program", Prof. Pierre Lévy, CRC, FRSC, University of Ottawa (Pierre is also member of this group!) describes IEML - Information Economy Meta Language.

This is a wiki and work in progress, feel free to join in if you feel you so wish!

{later reads: "The objective of the IEML research program is to establish this new addressing layer"}

One of the limitations of the current Web of data is the opacity by design of its ultimate universal
addressing system: the URIs.

As an abstract addressing system, the IEML semantic space is in principle independent of the URI address space just as it is independent of any physical or telecommunication addressing system.

However, from a synergistic perspective, IEML can bring to the system of URIs a general semantic interconnection and a full group of transformations on semantics.

Any IEML expression can indeed be represented by a URI in a straightforward manner, simply by taking any prefix and then adding a URI-encoded syntactic representation of the IEML expression to it.

Thus, such IEML-URIs can be directly used as concepts in RDF or OWL and it can offer an alternative grounding to the entities of the Web of data, mapping URIs to such IEML-URIs.

Therefore the power of IEML can be leveraged by the existing standards of the Web of data.

Symmetrically, the expressive and algebraic properties of IEML can leverage the current Web of data by providing it with a novel grounding that can make it more "semantic".