Coordination, Semantics and Ontologies

In the literature, interoperability is often informally defined in terms of the achievement of coordination among different parties in the accomplishment of some goals, ranging from the effective transmission of knowledge, usually about the world, to the execution of practical tasks. However, it is not clear whether adopting a shared ontology, or, in general, reaching an agreement on semantics, is either a necessary, or sufficient, condition to that end. In this paper, we set out to explore this topic by outlining an approach resting on minimal epistemological assumptions, questioning to which degree coordination capabilities usually associated with high-level cognitive functions (e.g., language) can be recovered in the proposed setting. It is suggested that our approach might also provide fruitful grounds for machine-learning-enhanced methodologies.