DAML Language Committee Minutes 31 October 2000

This page summarizes the telecon for the DAML Language Committee held from 1300 to 1400 PST on 31 October 2000. These minutes were prepared by the chairman, but have not yet been reviewed by the participants.

Participants

Announcements

Jim Hendler has invited Stefan Decker and Ian Horrocks to join the committee. They've accepted, and joined us starting with this telecon.

November 1 is Tom Hash's last day at BBN. Contact webmaster@daml.org or other specific aliases for DAML Lab requests.

Happy Halloween!

Last Week's Minutes

The chair was late in getting these out. We'll review them next week.

RDF As the Basis for DAML

Pat Hayes suggested at our last meeting that we inaugurate our technical discussions by addressing why RDF is being used as the basis for DAML.

Jim Hendler wasn't at this meeting, so we had only third party accounts of his early decision to base DAML on RDF. One goal was to leverage the existing Semantic Web efforts at W3C.

There was some discussion about what "based on RDF" meant:

Tentative conclusion: We'll continue to use RDF unless there's a compelling reason not to. There aren't currently a lot of alternatives on the table.

Technical Proposals

We will try to focus future technical discussions on specific proposals. Proposals should concisely and precisely identify a language change or extension, and may be posted to www-rdf-logic or sent to the committee members. Public discussion on www-rdf-logic is encouraged. A primary function of the committee will be to summarize previous www-rdf-logic discussions, weigh the issues, and make and publish decisions.

The chair hopes that, at equilibrium, the committee can focus about 75% of its energy on technical issues and 25% on process and administrative issues.

Committee Charter

Deb McGuinness had distributed a message from Peter Patel-Schneider prior to the meeting.

RESOLVED: The committee should develop a charter.

The chair and others were uncomfortable with Peter's notion of not tieing the committee to any particular outside group (DARPA, W3C, Jim Hendler, etc.). DARPA is paying for most of us, and the DAML program needs language specification(s) near-term to accomplish its goals.

Some points on W3C structure:

There's some tension about whether our processes should be completely open. Some members are much more used to working in a public fishbowl. There are also likely tradeoffs between openness and productivity.

It was felt that final decisions on a charter would be largely up to Jim Hendler, who wasn't present. Further discussion was tabled until Nov 14 when it was expected that Jim could participate.

Links

Kelly Barber's raw notes
last week's minutes

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