A theory of interaction semantics
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The aim of this article is to delineate a theory of interaction semantics and thereby provide a proper understanding of the "meaning" of the exchanged characters within an interaction. The idea is to describe the interaction (between discrete systems) by a mechanism that depends on information exchange, that is, on the identical naming of the "exchanged" characters – by a protocol. Complementing a nondeterministic protocol with decisions to a game in its interactive form (GIF) makes it interpretable in the sense of an execution. The consistency of such a protocol depends on the particular choice of its sets of characters. Thus, assigning a protocol its sets of charaacters makes it consistent or not, creating a fulfillment relation. The interpretation of the characters during GIF execution results in their meaning. The proposed theory of interaction semantics is consistent with the model of information transport and processing, it has a clear relation to models of formal semantics, it accounts for the fact that the meaning of a character is invariant against renaming and locates the concept of meaning in the technical description of interactions. It defines when two different characters have the same meaning and what an "interpretation" and what an "interpretation context" is as well as under which conditions meaning is compositional.
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