Program: DARPA Agent Markup Language
Project: UML-Based Ontology Toolset (UBOT)
Contract No. F30602-00-C-0188
Period covered: March 2001 - February 2002
Prepared by: Paul Kogut
Lockheed Martin Management and Data Systems
paul.a.kogut@lmco.com
610-354-3524
Date: March 15, 2001
Overview
Technical Goals:
Planned Collaborations:
Ontology Engineering Tools
Intended Users: Developers and maintainers of DAML ontologies.
Motivations: Graphical tools using a widely accepted standard notation for editing and visualizing DAML ontologies are critical for large-scale industry and government DAML applications. Telelogic, a major vendor of UML tools, agrees with this position and is in the process of signing a cooperative agreement with Lockheed Martin. Automated consistency checking of ontologies is important because ontology engineering is fundamentally difficult, especially when the ontologies are built by a team of people or by extending/merging pre-existing ontologies.
Prerequisite Knowledge: Users should have a background in software engineering and UML modeling with minimal training in knowledge representation and agent theory.
Plans:
DAML Annotation Tools
Intended Users: Technical and non-technical personnel who routinely produce documents (e.g., intelligence analysts) or have a large collection of legacy documents (e.g., Center for Army Lessons Learned) and novice/infrequent DAML users who just want to do a simple annotation of a web page.
Motivations: Annotation of documents is time consuming and a basic degree of automation helps.
Prerequisite Knowledge: None for most proper nouns and common relationships (e.g., person to organization). To add generation of domain specific annotations a knowledge engineer would need to have a background in natural language processing.
Plans:
DAML and UBOT Trial Applications
There are a number of good opportunities for trial applications of DAML and UBOT, including the planned collaborations described above. Within The UBOT team, we will focus on developing a DAML enabled Information Fusion Architecture (IFA) to experiment with DAML in the context of sensors and agents. This will involve annotating profiles for analysts and clients and collection source services. These DAML annotations will then be used by workflow agents, broker agents and negotiation agents to coordinate activities. This application is basically B2B e-commerce for the intelligence community.
Object Management Group Ontology Working Group
The UBOT team believes that liaison efforts with OMG will accelerate the transition of semantic web technology to government and industry. We also believe that the DAML effort will benefit from input from the OMG community. The anticipated tasks are:
Next Logical Steps (2002-2003)
We should have a clear picture of UML 2.0 in this timeframe. This major revision should bring UML closer to DAML, which should result in improvements to UBOT tools.
A very interesting avenue to explore is deep annotation. Can we capture the subtle semantics in natural language text in DAML to support complex question answering and summarization?
It may be advantageous at some point in time to integrate UBOT tools with the agent kit being developed by Lockheed Martin ATL for the CoABS program.
An interesting candidate application of DAML would be to annotate visual objects in an augmented reality system that Lockheed Martin is developing for ARDA. This DAML annotation could be used to retrieve and display characteristics of buildings or weapons, which are displayed in the context of 3D maps. Another interesting candidate application would be to apply DAML to the integration of collaborative design, analysis and test tools developed by Lockheed Martin for NASA. Both of these candidate applications would require extensions to our existing contract.