Technical Goals

The objective of the Components for Ontology Driven Information Push (CODIP) program is to build components for the dissemination of information based on its semantic content. To accomplish this, CODIP has defined the development of two key capabilities as technical objectives:

• UML tools for the creation, maintenance and analysis of DAML ontologies, and

• Publish and Subscribe based knowledge dissemination components and systems using DAML ontologies.

CODIP will continue to focus on these two primary capabilities and their transition into early adopter programs.

DUET

During FY'01-FY’02 the CODIP program developed and released for evaluation a prototype UML tool called the DAML-UML Enhanced Tool (DUET). DUET provides a capability to represent DAML ontologies in UML static models. Technical goals for further development of DUET in FY'03 are:

1. Support the current releases of DUET for Rational Rose and ArgoUML.

2. Work with the Object Management Group (OMG), the standards body for UML, to define standard UML 2.0 ontology representation.

3. Make DUET available for the development of ontologies significant to Operational Net Assessment (ONA)

ODKD

Also during FY'01-FY’02, the CODIP project developed the Ontology Driven Knowledge Dissemination (ODKD) system and transitioned a prototype ODKD to the Marine Corps GLC2 program. Technical goals for ODKD in FY'03 are:

1. Enhanced the current channel definition language, RQL, to include richer collection of predicates and constructs.

2. Extend the ODKD to support dissemination using multiple, articulated ontologies.

3. Make ODKD available for the near realtime dissemination of information relevant to the DAML Experiment.

Tools and APIs

To support the development of DUET and ODKD, a suite of DAML centric components and services were created. For FY'03, these components will continue to be developed as needed to support the primary CODIP objectives.

Among these are:

DAML API - A Java DAML API that provides a programmatic interface to ontologies with integration of a rule-based programming capability.
Ontology Articulation Service - An Ontology Articulation Service (OAS) that provides automated analysis of mappings between ontologies and builds articulation ontologies that codify the mappings in DAML+OIL.
Ontology Repository – An on-line repository of ontologies that provide web-based access to cached ontology instances.

Role in the DAML Experiment

CODIP will support these needs of the DAML Experiment.

Development of Ontologies

DUET will be made available to develop ontologies for the ONA. In addition to the from-scratch development capabilities, DUET also provides the ability to import existing UML models, in XMI and Rational Rose formats. The visualization of ontologies in UML will facilitate their analysis and validation by Subject Matter Experts (SME).

Distribution of Instance Data

ODKD can provide near real-time distribution of ONA relevant information. It provides semantic publish and subscribe service that uses DAML ontologies and articulations to route specific content to consumers based on their semantic information requirement. Basing information distribution upon the information's semantics provides a high degree of self-organization within the information flow. This eliminates the need for predetermined source identification and fixed routing schemes.

Future Work

AT&T will be actively pursuing the transition of DAML products to funded early adopter projects, such as ATD, JEFX and ACT II programs. In the longer term, AT&T will deploy DAML technology in military information systems. for example the Marine Corps GLC2 and USTRANSCOM’s AT21 programs.