Talk:Principal

Why not simply node? guaka wikitalk 03:41, 30 July 2007 (PDT)

When I was in University of Maryland, the professor I was working with suggested to use "principal" as a term that can embrace entities that are both humans, machines, software, ... I don't like it too much as a term and I don't think it is too used but it is maybe the semantically most correct term.

I prefer "user" (because it is nore humanized) but in this case the mental model induced by the term does not include non-human entities, like software scripts, robots, mobile phones, ...

I don't like "agent" because it reminds me of an independent software that is able to reason and act by itself (without human intervention), even if actually such an agent was never created actually.

"node" is not too appropriate because it is too graph specific and abstract, it would be hard to be convincing speaking of Alice and Bob as nodes.

What do you think? --PaoloMassa 03:50, 30 July 2007 (PDT)