Joint Committee Minutes 14 August 2001
This page summarizes the telecon for the Joint US/EU
Committee on Agent Markup Languages
held from 1300 to 1400 PDT on 14 August 2001.
These minutes were prepared by the chairman,
and were approved during the 21 August telecon.
Participants
- Dan Connolly
- Mike Dean
- Stefan Decker
- Benjamin Grosof (invited guest)
- Frank van Harmelen (joined late)
- Pat Hayes
- Jim Hendler (joined late)
- Ian Horrocks
- Deb McGuinness (joined late)
- Eric Miller (invited guest)
Announcements
See below.
Last Telecon's Minutes
Deferred to next week.
WebOnt
Eric Miller,
W3C
Semantic Web Activity
lead,
introduced the new W3C
Web Ontology Working Group (WebOnt).
The Call for Participation was sent to W3C members last night,
and the group was
announced
this afternoon.
Details are available
here.
Jim Hendler will chair the group.
This is a major milestone for the Joint Committee, the DAML program, DARPA, and W3C.
Ian reported on discussions with the
DAML-S Coalition
during the
DAML PI Meeting,
where they raised concerns about the expressiveness of the current DAML+OIL language.
- DAML+OIL can't express the constraint that multiple paths must lead to the
same anonymous individual.
- Process representation requires more expressiveness than service advertisement. The current plan is to
link to an external process representation supporting execution-level detail.
- We may be worrying too much about expressiveness.
Processes may be represented in a DAML-S layer above the DAML+OIL layer.
- OilEd
had trouble parsing the latest DAML-S ontologies.
Ian corrected some syntax errors, and it now loads.
Sean Bechhofer is actively turning OilEd into "DAML+OilEd".
DAML-PI Meeting
Mike recalled the
Reasoning and Rules
breakout session at the
DAML PI Meeting,
which may have a significant bearing on our next steps.
This was a very successful conference.
SWWS had ~250 participants, reflecting very broad interest (industry, academia, international, ...)
in the Semantic Web.
Stefan noted that follow-ups are being posted to the
conference site.
Of participular interest is a list of challenges,
continuing the
calendar challenge
for which Stefan presented folks from CMU a bottle of champagne.
Deb announced that a steering committee for future SWWS meetings has been
announced that includes, among others, Stefan Decker, Jim Hendler, and Deborah
McGuinness.
Dieter Fensel is organizing the next SWWS in June 2002
in conjunction with the
OntoWeb
meeting in Sardinia.
A book is being prepared.
Ian Horrocks, Benjamin Grosof, Stefan Decker, and Peter Patel-Schneider met
during IJCAI to discuss rules.
They hope to present a formal proposal next week.
Jim Hendler reported on
the panel
The Semantic Web Elephant: What Do the Blind Men See?,
which attracted over 200 people even
amid parallel sessions on the last day of the conference.
A surprising number of audience questions focused on XML.
Again, there was a lot of interest and excitement,
and very little criticism from the AI community.
Next Steps
Jim outlined a proposal he'd discussed informally with several folks:
- The formation of WebOnt marks a milestone for the Joint Committee,
achieving our major objective of developing a web ontology language and transitioning it to W3C.
- We should take this opportunity as a point of demarkation and a chance to reconstitute.
- The committee works together well,
and there's still a lot of interesting work to do.
- Rules and query are clearly hot topics
(and also of interest to the EU government people).
- We should seek to create new "languages" that we can transition to W3C in ~6 months,
and then repeat the process.
- We should offer current members the opportunity to gracefully bow out,
and accept some new members with expertise in rules and query
(Benjamin Grosof, Richard Fikes, and Harold Boley come to mind).
- Mike may want to pass the chairmanship on to someone else.
This proposal was well received.
Dan Connolly indicated that he
(and Jim Hendler)
expect to be consumed by WebOnt,
and would be unlikely to continue active
participation in the Joint Committee.
Dan and Eric indicated that someone else from W3C
might become involved.
Pat, Deb, and others stressed the value of active W3C participation.
Mike suggested that the group focus a little more broadly than just rules and query,
addressing other new ground like working with multiple ontologies,
and continuing to address language issues raised by the expanding DAML+OIL user base.
Eric said that he wanted much tighter coordination between the Joint
Committee and the
Semantic Web Coordination Group.
The chair of the reconstituted Joint Committee
could be invited to join the Semantic Web Coordination Group.
We'll continue this discussion next week,
giving folks a chance to think about things.
New DAML Program Manager
Jim Hendler announced that
Murray Burke
will succeed him as DARPA Program Manager for the
DAML program,
effective September 1.
RDF Core Feedback
Pat Hayes reported on the recent
RDF Core Face-to-Face Meeting.
Our
feedback
has been well received,
however the working group declined our request to allow
subclass loops,
citing compatibility concerns with mapping to object-oriented programming languages.
Frank asked if they proposed an additional mechanism to
represent class equality.
We'll plan to discuss this at length in 2 weeks.
Next Week
We'll keep our current weekly telecon schedule for the time being.
Next week we'll issue an open invitation to potential new members, including
- Murray Burke
- Benjamin Grosof
- Richard Fikes
- Harold Boley
- a DAML-S representative
We'll plan to split our time between the expected rules proposal
and continuing the discussion on next steps.
Links
IRC
Kelly Barber's raw notes
last week's minutes (soon)
Joint Committee home page
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