The tri-sortal internet of interoperating humans, systems and enterprises

Semantic Web, Social Web, and new economic challenges are causing major shifts in the pervasive fabric that the internet has become, in particular for the business world. The internet's new role as participatory medium and its ubiquity leads to dense tri-sortal communities of humans and businesses mixed with computer systems, and semantically interoperating in a well-defined sense. Many of the challenges and ongoing (r)evolutions appear to produce as yet seemingly contradictory requirements and thus produce potentially very interesting research areas. In this paper we argue that linguistics, real world semantics and pragmatics, scalability, the tri-sortal nature of the communities involved, the balance between usability and reusability, and the methodological requirements for nondisruptive adoption by enterprises of the new technologies provide vectors for fundamental computer science research, for interesting new artifacts, and for new valorizations of enterprise interoperability. We also try to argue the point for increased multidisciplinary research projects in order to tackle the issues involved.