ABSTRACT
In the computational realm, the most frequently offered answer to that question is that “semantics”—a term almost always used in reference to formal languages such as those we use for programming—refers to the meaning of a computational representation. In the absence of productions, the information is literally “meaning-less.” And while that condition might be rare, it sets a boundary condition on semantics. Computational representations “have a semantics,” because we can perform computations on them. The extensible Markup Language ecosystem implicitly imagines a radical decoupling between the act of data modeling and the act of processing data. In fact, it breaks the act of data modeling itself into several discrete stages, which, in practical terms, translates into a decoupling of the social act of marking up texts from the social act of modeling data, and both of these from the social act of processing data.
