1 Introduction – the Information FoodChain

The goal of OnTo-Agents is still to establish an agent infrastructure on the WWW or WWW-like networks. Such an agent infrastructure requires an information food chain every part of the food chain provides information, which enables the existence of the next part. An overview of the OnTo-Agents information food chain is depicted in Figure 1.

Figure 1 OntoAgents Information FoodChain

2 Specific Description of Work

Specifically, we will make the following contributions to enhance and deploy the information food chain over the course of the next year:

2.1 OntoWebber: A Web Site Management System for SemanticWeb.org

We have set up and established http://SemanticWeb.org as the Semantic Web portal and have developed OntoWebber, an approach to ontology based Website generation and management. Several tools have been implemented within the Ontowebber approach, which considerably simplify the task of creating an ontology driven portal. We will automate the Semantic Web community portal using these tools. Based on the DAML technology and a model-driven approach, we are able to apply coherent data storage and querying, logic inference, information integration, and hypertext design methodology to the system we are developing, thus largely ease the job of Web site data management.

We will measure the effort that it takes to create and maintain the Website and will compare it to the effort that conventional approaches (e.g., manual or augmented with industrial web site creation tools like “Cold Fusion”).

2.2 Ontology Articulation

We have build a tool and library for generating the articulation between ontologies associated with information sources. Dealing with multiple ontologies is essential to gain information for decisions from multiple sources. Articulation allows linkage of ontologies that come from distinct sources without requiring their complete integration. We will apply the ontology articulation technology within the Semantic Web Community portal and OntoWebber approach to create articulation between different ontologies. The progress will be measured by the amount of human effort necessary to articulate a DAML+OIL ontology to the Semantic Web Community Portal domain ontology.

2.3 Inference Engine

DAML, as a knowledge representation language, needs a query and inference mechanism. Furthermore it is necessary to combine DAML Ontologies with all kind of other data sources (product catalogs, directories like DMOZ etc.) to allow exploitation of the ontologies in large-scale applications. These different data sources often have their own semantics, so that a query and inference mechanism for DAML must also be able to capture other semantic definitions. We have completed a first version of TRIPLE (see http://triple.semanticweb.org), a rules engines able to reason with DAML+OIL and various other modeling approaches used on the Web. We have used Triple to reason with several different ontologies and representation mechanisms and have developed an approach to integrate the rule-based language with a description logic based language to allow hybrid reasoning. Triple is used within the OntoWebber approach for integrating heterogenous data sources and ontologies and will be part of the Semantic Web Community Portal. We plan to provide an easy to install version of Triple for download, and hope to create a user basis, which will reason and transform DAML+OIL ontologies and instance data using Triple. The number of users, which will use Triple to reason with DAML+OIL ontologies, will measure the success of Triple and provide a metric.

2.4 Annotation Tool

The prototype of our OntoMat Webpage annotation tool has been finished. We are increasing the usability and outreach by creating a plugin for OntoMat that enables to add RDF-Instances (based on DAML+OIL Ontologies) on PDF-Documents. We have established collaboration with Teknowledge (a DAML project partner), which we will integrate OntoMat with their COTS applications. To further disseminate the results we are organizing a workshop about semantic authoring and annotation. These workshop will present DAML+OIL related research. (http://saakm2002.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/).

3 The DAML Experiment

We will support the DAML Experiment with the tool suite that was developed during the last two years: OntoMat, our annotation framework, may be used to annotate Web resources with terms from the domain ontology, describing Afghanistan and the Taleban. OntoWebber, our web site modeling approach is useful for the creation of an Afghanistan and the Taleban information portal, presenting the crawled information from the marked up pages in a centralized and focused way. The ontology articulation toolkit and Triple, the inference engine, may be used to integrate other structured information sources into the Afghanistan-Taleban information portal.

4 Next Steps

DAML establishes the foundation for intelligent agents on the Web: machine understandable information is available for automated agents. One of the remaining questions is how to enable ordinary Internet users to construct their personal Internet agent for specific tasks.

We have already developed the basic framework for representing shareable processes at various levels of details and for configuring and combining processes to executable agents. This includes a process ontology, describing the vocabulary necessary to represent a process, a configuration ontology (the vocabulary necessary to configure and link different processes), and a compiler to compile processes and configuration descriptions to executable Java Code. As major tasks for the outer years we expect the following items:

The integration of the data mediation technology into the process-sharing framework.
The development of interactive, graphical tools to help users to configure agents
Indexing and retrieval technology to help users (and agents) to find described relevant process knowledge on the Web (e.g. Task Ontologies).
A framework for enabling automated agents to extend their capabilities on their own (retrieving process knowledge from the Web and adding the described capabilities to their already existing capabilities).

We believe that especially the last item leads to self-adapting and self-extending intelligent agents.

Another item that becomes more and more relevant is Peer-to-Peer communications and systems. Combining different Peer to Peer services in an ad-hoc way is important e.g., for a high tech battlefield, where intelligent devices (e.g., sensors or transportation devices) need to self organize themselves. Adapting the DAML+OIL technology to a Peer-to-Peer context is a relevant and challenging task.