General-Purpose Computing on a Semantic Network Substrate

A semantic network is a directed labeled graph (Sowa, 1991). The thesis of this article is that the state of a computing machine, its low-level instructions, and the executing program can be represented as a semantic network. The computational model that is presented can be instantiated using any semantic network representation. However, given the existence of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) (Manola & Miller, 2004) and the popular Web Ontology Language (OWL) (McGuinness & Harmelen, 2004), this article presents the theory and the application in terms of these constructs. The computing model that is proposed is perhaps simple in theory, but in application, requires a relatively strong background in the computer sciences.