Aplikasi Web di Masa Depan: Semakin Konvergen dengan Teknologi Agen

Agen bukan merupakan hal baru di dunia informatika. Sejak perkembangan AI (Artificial Intelligence - Kecerdasan Buatan), agen sebenarnya merupakan inti dari pembahasan. Jika dirunut sejak awal, kita bisa melihat teori agensi pada pemodelan ekonomi (principal-agents). Teori agensi pada pemodelan tersebut mendasarkan pada pemikiran bahwa principal selaku pemilik merekrut, menggaji, mempekerjakan agents untuk melakukan pekerjaan-pekerjaan tertentu. Tentu saja para agents tersebut harus mempunyai kecerdasan (keahlian) tertentu dan bisa bersikap serta mengambil keputusan (dalam ruang lingkupnya) terkait dengan tujuan kerjasama tersebut. Dalam kerjasama tersebut, dipastikan tidak akan muncul agency problems, yaitu konflik yang muncul karena perbedaan goals di antara mereka. Konsep inilah yang sebenarnya ingin dikerjakan pada AI. Sederhana dalam penggambaran, tetapi sangat sulit dalam implementasi. Agen itu sendiri bisa berupa agen tunggal serta MAS (Multi-Agent Systems). Agen tunggal tentu lebih mudah diimplementasikan. MAS merupakan topik yang sangat sulit (jaman dulu disebut sebagai DAI - Distributed Artificial Intelligence). Kompleksitas MAS disebabkan karena adanya interaksi antar agen.

Sementara itu, perkembangan teknologi jaringan yang sudah sampai tingkat konektivitas di seluruh dunia ternyata membuat perkembangan tuntutan pengguna aplikasi menjadi lebih kompleks. Ingat, semakin ringan dan semakin ingin dimanjakan, semakin sulit pekerjaan para pengembang aplikasi. Pada era ini, aplikasi pada dasarnya bisa kita bagi menjadi aplikasi yang headless serta aplikasi berbasis Web. Aplikasi headless adalah aplikasi yang tidak menggunakan user interface untuk si pemakai karena memang tidak dikhususkan untuk pemakai biasa. Pemakai menggunakan aplikasi ini, tetapi tidak menyadari jika aplikasi ini ada. Contoh sederhana aplikasi ini antara lain aplikasi crawler dari berbagai situs mesin pencari. Pemakai hanya perlu ke (misalnya) google, dan mencari kata kunci yang dikehendaki. Mekanisme dan penyediaan infrastruktur dari aplikasi tersebut kebanyakan tidak diketahui dan dipahami pemakai biasa. Aplikasi Web pada dasarnya menyediakan user interface untuk berkomunikasi dengan pemakai.

Apa keterkaitan antara kedua hal itu? Web menyedian berbagai macam sumber daya yang sangat melimpah ruah, mulai dari sumber daya yang hanya bisa dipahami oleh manusia (era Syntactic Web dengan HTML tanpa kandungan semantik) maupun sumber daya yang berupa sumber daya yang bisa "dipahami" mesin (dikenal dengan istilah sumber daya semantik - Semantic Web). Nah sekarang, kondisi seperti ini bisa memungkinkan orang untuk berpikir dalam kerangka teori agensi di atas. Pemakai menjadi pincipal, sementara agents akan berupa software: "saya ingin sesuatu dari Web, kerjakan dan berikan ke saya hasilnya" dengan seminimal mungkin intervensi ke software tersebut. Tugas para pengembang barangkali untuk memungkinkan hal-hal di atas bisa terjadi serta memungkinkan otomasi di Internet/Web seperti yang dicetuskan oleh Tim Berners-Lee pada tahun 2001:

1. Merealisasikan software agent, dalam konteks ini sofware agent yang bisa berkomunikasi dengan si pemakai. Riset di bidang human-agent communication ini juga diperlukan, bersamaan dengan NLP (Natural Language Processing). Pemakai "berbicara" dan menyuruh agen untuk mengerjakan sesuatu on behalf of its owner. Pada konteks ini, penelitian yang dulu pernah dikembangkan oleh Terry Winograd menjadi penting (LAP - Language-Action Perspective).
2. Merealisasikan aplikasi Web yang juga sebenarnya merupakan salah satu agen pada suatu masyarakat MAS. Agent ini mempunyai dua "muka", satu merupakan aplikasi Web dengan user interface HTML-CSS-JavaScript-etc, muka yang lain adalah agen. Agen ini merupakan wakil dari pemilik Web yang siap berkolaborasi dengan software agent dari pemakai. Komunikasi Agent-to-Agent ini juga merupakan hal yang kompleks dan merupakan salah satu standar yang dihasilkan oleh FIPA (http://www.fipa.org) berupa ACL (Agent Communication Language).

Nah, silahkan mulai bersiap-siap jika memang (berniat) terjun ke dunia pengembangan software. That should be pretty interesting. :p

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Posted in Agent, Pragmatic Web, Semantic Web, Syntactic Web, Web, Web Engineering

Web Semiotics: Web As a Sign System

Introduction

A "web application", also known as "website" or just "web", is a kind of application which uses client-server architecture built on top of TCP/IP network infrastructure. This has become an important part of every organization in the world. Lots of people around the world use organization's website as the way to find any information about organization, products, quality, and any other things specific for that organization. Therefore, it is important to understand how one can develop a website which will become a representation of the organization. In this sense, we may say that the website has become a sign which will represent the organization. An understanding of the sign systems as the key concepts in semiotics will be important for web engineer.

What is Semiotics?

Semiotics itself is a complex topic. Its root comes from ancient greek although at first it comes from medical things by Hippocrates (460 - 377 BC) to mean essentially a medical diagnosis, a disease based on 'sign' or known as symptoms. It was Plato (circa 428 - 347 BC) who took it away from medical diagnosis with his argumentation that human forms were deceptive things that did not stand for reality directly, but rather as a mental idealization of it (Danesi, 2004). Aristotle (384 - 322 BC), a pupil of Pluto, investigate the relation between forms and reality more closely. There are still many name who has big impact toward semiotics world but since we will not concentrate on historical perspective, we will not go into the details on semiotics history. We will propose some theories which will have impact towards our understanding of Web as a sign systems.

The term "Semiotics" was used by British Philosopher - John Locke (1632 - 1704). At that time, the term was "Semeiotics" (from Greek word "Semeion", means "a sign, a mark"), and it was used in his book "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1690). Meanwhile, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857 - 1913) used the word "Semiology" to denote the study of sign (he used the -logy just as other discipline such as psychology, biology, anthropology, sociology, etc). Charles S. Pierce reintroduce Locke's concept and consistently used the word "Semiotics". Until now, it becomes a strong influence and people tend to use the word "Semiotics" (Danesi, 2004). There are some scholars who made definition about Semiotics. The shortest definition is that it is "the study of signs", while a sign is defined as "something that stands for something, to someone in some capacity" (Danesi and Perron, 1999). A definition of Semiotics by Ferdinand de Saussure (although he called it "Semiology" in this definition) will be used:

A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable. It would be part of social psychology and consequently of general psychology. I shall call it semiology (from Greek semeion “sign”). Semiology would show what constitutes signs, what laws govern them.

Saussure offered a "dyadic" or two-part model of the sign. He defined a sign as being composed of "signifier" / "signifiant" (the form which the sign takes) and the "signified" / "signifié" (the concept it represents) (Chandler, 2011). In a graphical form, this definition and its example can be represented below (picture was taken from Chandler, 2011):

Different with Saussure, Peirce characterized "triadic" or three-part model of the sign. He defined a sign as being composed of the three elements:

1. Sign or Representamen (e.g Saussure's signifier).
2. Object: the thing that represented by sign. This could be physically real object such as "laptop" and "car", or abstract concept such as "bright idea" and "I don't care about the story that you told me and I feel boring".
3. Interpretant: according to Peirce in his own words: "The Sign creates something in the Mind of the Interpreter, which something, in that it has been so created by the sign, has been, in a mediate and relative way, also created by the Object of the Sign, although the Object is essentially other than the Sign. And this creature of the sign is called the Interpretant" (see Bergman and Paavola, 2003). Simply put, it is the part of sign which is used to denote the meaning of sign by sign interpreter, the sense made by the sign.

These triadic model can be represented with the diagram below (picture was taken from Irvine, 2012):

The Peirce triadic model also known as "The Semiotic Triangle", has some variants. The most well-known variant is the semiotic triangle which proposed by Ogden and Richard in their book which was published in 1923 titled "The Meaning of Meaning" (picture was taken from http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Paper/Engestrom/expanding/ch2.htm):

Semiotics and Sign System

Loosely speaking, a website can always be considered as the representation of whatever behind the website, be it a company, a person, business entity, musical band, singer, etc. Using Peirce's Triadic, we may define a website as a part of semiotics and as a sign system below:

It is clear from the diagram that developing website should consider first about "what should be the interpretant"? We may then can begin our adventure to web semiotics by accomodating some theory from algebra, which is now known as "Algebra Semiotics". Surely there are many areas which affect the engineering of a website, for example, social aspect should be considered as an important part, the "knowledge" embedded into the website also make sense as a part of knowledge engineering, while we should not forget also many technical TCP/IP things and all other important software engineering topics related with the engineering of the web, and many others.

In the future, I will dig deeper about Algebra Semiotics and how it probably can help developers in Semantic and Pragmatic Web. 

References

• Daniel Chandler, "Semiotics for Beginner", http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/Documents/S4B/, accessed July 8, 2012 22:40.
• Marcel Danesi, Paul Perron, "Analyzing Cultures: An Introduction and Handbook", Indiana University Press, 1999.
• Marcel Danesi, "Messages, Signs, and Meanings: A Basic Textbook in Semiotics and Communication", 3rd edition, Canadian Scholars' Press Inc, Toronto, 2004.
• Martin Irvine, "Structural Linguistics, Semiotics, and Communication Theory: Basic Outlines and Assumptions", http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/theory/Semiotics_and_Communication.html, accessed July 9, 2012 05:45.
• Mats Bergman, Sami Paavola, "The Commens Dictionary of Peirce's Terms", http://www.helsinki.fi/science/commens/dictionary.html, accessed July 9, 2012 05:16.

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Posted in Pragmatic, Semantic, Semiotics, Web