Joint Committee Minutes 15 May 2001

This page summarizes the telecon for the Joint US/EU Committee on Agent Markup Languages held from 1300 to 1400 PDT on 15 May 2001. These minutes were prepared by the acting chairperson (Deborah McGuinness) in the absence of the normal chairperson (Mike Dean), and were approved during the 29 May telecon.

Participants

Dan Connolly
Stefan Decker
Frank van Harmelen
Pat Hayes
Jeff Heflin
Ian Horrocks
Ora Lassila
Deb McGuinness
Peter Patel-Schneider
Lynn Stein

Announcements

Mike Dean will return to chairing next week – May 22, 2001.

Last Meeting's Minutes

The minutes from May 8 were approved by those present.

These are still published at: http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/people/dlm/2001-05-08.html and will be moved over to the DAML site when Mike Dean returns.

Technical discussion points:

Stefan emailed a proposal the day of the meeting. The proposal was discussed at this conference call and the discussion will continue on May 22.

Action item: All committee members – review Stefan’s proposal and be prepared to discuss it on Tuesday, May 22, 2001.

The committee did discuss some of the proposed changes.

Issue: Unique names assumption. The proposal suggested making the unique names assumption the default case.

The proposal was modified by Pat Hayes to request an explicit statement of a namespace to have the unique names assumption. Dan Connolly made a suggestion using unique properties.

Action item: Dan Connolly will write up his suggestion using unique properties.

Issue: It can be difficult to figure out which ontologies a class is associated with.

Action item: Dan Connolly will write up a suggestion for handling the issue.

Issue: Property Restrictions may not be seen as natural. Some people would like tools with syntactic sugar that makes defining things such as restrictions more natural.

Issue: What is an atom? One answer is that it is only a triple. Peter Patel-Schneider suggested that it could be considered to be any collection of connected terms. (References/suggestions to review Jimmy Crawford’s work (pfps will provide pointer) and Levy’s Karin work were made).

Issue: No one is acting as an editor for RDF-logic. The group agreed that while many questions were being answered that were posted to rdf-logic, no one was making sure that all queries were being answered. Additionally, no one is maintaining a FAQ. For now, it was agreed that if expectations are set appropriately, this is an acceptable solution for the moment. A suggestion was made that committee members who know of questions that have not been answered could make an effort to answer the queries.

Issue: Dan Connolly discussed a write-up he had recently done. Pointers are in last week’s logged IRC – Kelly, can you retrieve the pointers from the log (or give me a pointer to the log. I tried http://www.daml.org/committee/minutes/2001-05-15-irc.txt which did not work)?

Upcoming Weeks

On May 22, we will continue the discussion on the topics raised by Stefan Decker, Dan Connolly, and Pat Hayes.

The imports discussion was delayed.

If we need the imports link, it is available at: http://www.daml.org/listarchive/joint-committee/0344.html

Links

last week's minutes
Joint Committee home page

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