1. Goals and Objectives

A. Language Development:

We will continue to support the Joint US and EU Language Working Group. Mike Dean will remain as Chairman of the WG and we will host a weekly teleconference, provide the agenda and maintain the minutes. The main focus in 2003 will be on the addition of rules to the language. We will also support the W3C Ontology Working Group, RDF Core Working Group and the new Semantic Services Working Group efforts.

B. General Support:

We will continue to support planning and hosting for PI meetings and other meetings as required, to including coordination with the facility for providing wireless LAN connectivity.

C. Tool Development:

We will continue the development of DAML/OWL tools. Particular emphasis will be placed on updating existing DAML tools as necessary to support OWL. We will develop an updated version of VisioDAML to VisioOWL and VisioOWL-Light. We will continue to improve the current OWL Validator. We will continue to improve DAML-DB and migrate it to become OWL-DB. We will also coordinate with other researchers for the update of their tools.

D. Ontology Development:

We will continue to extend the scope and depth of the SONAT related ontologies and edit the existing ontologies to be OWL compliant. We intend to bring the Open Cyc ontology into SONAT and coordinate with Cycorp to update Open Cyc to an OWL version by January.

E. Services Development:

We will directly support the DAML Services Working Group by providing Mark Burstein’s services to that effort. We will integrate DAML Services into the DAML Experiment to provide an end-to-end test of capabilities and performance issues. We will support the development of additional DAML Services Use Cases.

F. Agent Development:

We will emphasize the development of new and more complex agents this year. This will include expanding the existing DAML agent infrastructure beyond CoABS by evaluating Cougaar and other agent approaches. We will coordinate with the other research teams to expand the scope of the current agents and increase the number of agents being developed for the DAML Experiment. We will experiment with DAML Services architecture as it evolves in its capability to support a general agent infrastructure.

G. Integration:

We will continue to focus on using the DAML Experiment (SONAT) as the means to integrate and evaluate technologies being developed across the DAML Program. We will work closely with the other research teams to identify components of their technology development efforts that are suitable for integration and assist them in getting their technology ready for integration. We will provide an updated version of the DAML Experiment Plan to help the research teams gain better insight into the integration effort. We will evolved the DAML Experiment to focus more on the identification of the most suitable/effective units to perform specific tasks in the context of a larger military operation and in particular, the targeting aspects of the operation. We will continue to identify metrics associated with the DAML Experiment and measure those metrics so as to clearly show the progress for key developmental elements of the DAML effort.

H. Transition:

We will continue to identify early adopters within the DoD community for the application of DAML technologies to solving selected problems. We will use the DAML Experiment as an example of applying DAML technologies in the context of the application of Semantic Web technologies to DoD problems. We will conduct demonstrations and briefings as necessary to support these objectives. We will also support ongoing and emerging DAML transition efforts such as Horus, Joint Battlespace Infosphere, Foreign Clearance Guide, NSA Knowledge System Prototype, Army Knowledge Online, and Joint Warfare and Analysis Center. With respect to Horus, we will coordinate closely with the Horus development team in identifying DAML technologies that are mature enough to be brought into Horus and provide feedback to the DAML research teams on requirements relevant to future Horus development needs.

2. Next logical steps

The DAML/OWL language must become simpler to use in order for widespread adoption of the technology to take place. Creating ontologies, instance data and agents to process the knowledge must be on the level of complexity of developing a traditional web site. The current syntax of the language is too verbose and complex. It needs to be simplified. The various language constructs that reference rdf: and owl: in the syntax for an ontology are particularly onerous. One of the next steps for the Language Working Group, after getting rules on track, should be to focus on simplifying the OWL syntax. There are a number of historical reasons why the current syntax is so bad, but those must not be allowed to hold sway because simplifying the syntax is absolutely essential to the wide-spread use of the language.

DAML query and search must evolve to be simple to implement and use. There will be emphasis in this area in 2003, but there is a long way to go before we have search and query capabilities as easy to use as Google.