''To allow for what will principally be communication between computers in the next generation of Internet communication, new standards will have to be accepted next to HTML and CGI. Following Decker et al. (2000), three demands can be defined that will have to be met for a standard in order to be adequate for this purpose:
- Syntactic clarity and interoperability
- This demands that the syntax of the format is clear and that parsing the data (i.e. retrieving the data from the formatted file or stream) is cheap and efficient, and that parsers are freely available for most developing environments.
- Semantic clarity and interoperatibility
- This concerns the extraction of information from the data, i.e. the mapping of unknown terms in the data on known terms. The demand is met if the mapping between the data structure and the knowledge structure (i.e. the domain model) is straightforward, meaning that it has to be clear what each element in the data means.
- Universal expressiveness
- Since it cannot be known beforehand what knowledge will have to be exchanged and in which domains the standard will be used, it has to be possible to express all sorts of knowledge in all types of domains.''