From Pocket-Inferer to SemanticWebBrowser: Incremental development of a user-friendly, deterministic, language-interface-based, web-paradigm-agnostic, IDE-like, energy-efficient Web-Browser

Why do official clerks not have the equivalent of a calculator like engineers do but for inference? The fundamental idea of this paper is for ChatGPT-like apps to lose natural language for less energy consumption and more determinism in their answers based on controlled natural languages like ACE; and to capture this new paradigm in a new type of browser that has natural language as its primary interface, here called a semantic web-first browser. The idea is proposed in several design steps, beginning with a simple to use calculator-like program to do inference with natural language (pocket-inferer), for which, when a programmer-mode is turned on, transforms into an IDE-like ACE-editor. The idea is then further developed into a semantic web browser, which can also reference data and queries from the semantic web and later, it is philosphised how a web-paradigm agnostic SemanticWebBrowser could be realized. This poses a fundamental anthesis to ChatGPT-like apps and LLM-centered visions for the WWW with the biggest merit being to tradeoff natural language for more precision and less energy-consumption through controlled natural language. The five main points this paper makes are: - 1. AI browsers with their high energy consumption are not suitable for daily usage (not in the near future, if ever). - 2. There has not yet been found a sufficient interface for the semantic web to be appealing to end-users and reach wider adoption - 3. Controlled natural language like ACE could serve well as a main interface for semantic data, because they manage to capture the potential of semantic web data better than any visualization ever could - 4. The best application for this approach would be a new kind of browser, which realizes “language as an interface” for the semantic web - 5. Derived from language as the main interface, the browser needs to center around the interaction with language and therefore look like a text editor or IDE. - 6. While showing the merits of the semantic web, the browser should also be “backwards compatible” with the traditional world wide web. It is largely based on the following work: Kaarel Kaljurand. “Attempto Controlled English as a Semantic Web Language” (2007).