From XML to Holons
TL;DR
This paper traces a personal and technical journey from the HTML Document Object Model of 1996 through XML, XSLT, XSD, XSD, XQuery, RDF, SHACL, and the neural systems of the present day, arriving at the holonic graph as the resolution of a tension that has persisted, largely unacknowledged, throughout the life of the markup community.
Abstract
Thirty years of working with markup languages, semantic web standards, and knowledge representation systems reveals a single recurring problem wearing many different masks: the problem of bounded, scoped, composable meaning. This paper traces a personal and technical journey from the HTML Document Object Model of 1996 through XML, XSLT, XSD, XQuery, RDF, SHACL, and the neural systems of the present day, arriving at the holonic graph as the resolution of a tension that has persisted, largely unacknowledged, throughout the life of the markup community. The holon — Arthur Koestler's term for a unit that is simultaneously a whole and a part of a larger whole — turns out to have been implicit in every major design decision the XML and semantic web stacks ever made. RDF 1.2, SHACL 1.2, and named graphs now provide the formal apparatus to make it explicit. The implications extend from knowledge governance to the grounding of large language models.