After the Inaugural: What Comes Next for the Holon Community Group

Posted 19 June 2026 — Kurt Cagle, Acting Chair, W3C Holon Community Group

Thank you to everyone who joined us this morning for the inaugural meeting of the W3C Holon Community Group. Thirty-plus people showing up at 7am Pacific on a public holiday — and staying engaged for nearly two hours — is a strong signal that this work matters to a lot of people across a lot of domains. The conversation in the chat channel alone was remarkable: category theory, biomedical graphs, scene description formats, and active inference all appearing within the first half hour. This is the room we wanted.

The meeting recording, presentation deck, agenda, and transcript are available at the community GitHub repository:

https://github.com/w3c-cg/holon/tree/main/community/meetings/2026-06-19

We encourage anyone who missed the session, or who wants to share it with colleagues, to link there directly.

A Terminology Question: What Do We Call a Tracked Entity?

One thread that surfaced clearly during the meeting — in both the presentation and the chat — is that the term agent is badly overloaded and may not serve us well going forward.

It carries at least three incompatible meanings in the communities this group spans: the classical AI / rational-agent sense; the AI tooling sense (autonomous LLM stacks, “agentic” pipelines); and domain-specific senses in biomedical contexts where an agent may be a protein, a peptide, a molecule, or a cell. Using the same word for a tracked entity inside a holon invites confusion from the start.

Several alternatives were raised or suggested:

• Participant — neutral, implies being part of a context, but perhaps too passive
• Character — maps well to game, media, and narrative theory uses; a character has identity, state, and trajectory through a world. The concern raised is that it skews too strongly toward the entertainment domain.
• Actor — has distributed systems baggage (the actor model) as well as theatrical connotations
• Subject — perhaps the most promising candidate. In RDF, subject already occupies a precise structural role (the S in an SPO triple). In linguistics and philosophy, a subject is the entity around which predication and action organise. It scales from proteins to player characters to legal persons without strain, and it carries no AI-agent connotations. One caveat worth noting: in medical and legal contexts, “subject” can imply a human under observation or study, with associated ethical weight (research subjects, GDPR data subjects), so we will want to examine how it lands in biomedical and regulatory domains.

This is an open question, not a decision. We will raise it formally at the next meeting on 3 July, but we would very much like to hear your thinking beforehand. Please post to the mailing list at public-cg-holon@w3.org with your candidate and your reasoning — especially if you bring a domain perspective (biomedical, legal, geospatial, gaming, supply chain) that these candidates handle well or handle badly.

Good terminology, established early, saves a great deal of rework later.

Working Groups: Formalising Structure

At the inaugural meeting we proposed the following initial working groups:

• I. Core Architecture — holon model, named graph containers, boundary semantics, the scene/event graph partition structure
• II. DataBook Standard — the Markdown-based substrate for holon grounding, provenance, and LLM integration
• III. Network Architecture — federated holon meshes, messaging patterns, interoperability conventions
• IV. Validation, Verification & Security — SHACL-based boundary enforcement, portal constraints, security considerations
• V. Industry Utilisation — domain application patterns across healthcare, media, supply chain, finance, education
• VI. Ontology & Heterarchical Alignment — alignment with BFO, UFO, DSRP, and related foundational frameworks

At the 3 July meeting we will be formally approving these working groups and their initial chairs. If you are interested in leading or co-chairing any of these groups, we want to hear from you.

Interest and Participation Form — Coming Shortly

To make it easy to capture who wants to contribute what, we are preparing a short participation form that will ask for:

• Your name, background, and organisational affiliation (if any)
• Which working groups you want to participate in
• Whether you are interested in a chair or editor role
• What you are hoping to get out of the CG and the respective working groups
• Any reference implementations or prior work you would like to contribute

Watch the mailing list for the link — it will go out before the end of next week, well ahead of the July 3rd meeting, so we can arrive there with a clearer picture of who is doing what.

Next Meeting

Date: Friday, 3 July 2026
Time: 7:00–8:00am Pacific / 10:00–11:00am Eastern / 15:00–16:00 BST
Agenda: Will be distributed to the mailing list no later than 48 hours prior.

Agenda items for the July 3rd session are welcome now. If you have something you want to present, demonstrate, or raise for discussion, please send it to the mailing list or contact me directly at kurt.cagle@gmail.com.

Kurt Cagle is a consulting ontologist, knowledge graph architect, and technical author. He serves as Acting Chair of the W3C Holon Community Group and publishes The Ontologist and The Inference Engineer on Substack. Copyright 2026 Kurt Cagle.