Joint Committee Minutes 23 October 2001

This page summarizes the telecon for the Joint US/EU Committee on Agent Markup Languages held from 1300 to 1400 PDT on 23 October 2001. These minutes were prepared by the chairman, and were approved during the 30 October telecon.

Participants

Announcements

No announcements this week.

Last Week's Minutes

The minutes from October 9 and 16 were approved by those present.

Submission Intellectual Property Rights

Peter is still trying to reach the Lucent lawyer.

The copyright itself is not a major problem. The problem is with "related" IP issues, particularly in light of the on-going W3C IP policy debate over royalty-free vs. reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) licensing terms. W3C apparently would not be content even with us putting the DAML+OIL documents in the public domain. Also, journals will accept Lucent's copyright release, but W3C requires use of its own form.

Peter's understanding is that only the submitter has to sign the IP release, while every author may need to transfer copyright.

Extra-Query Information

As he's worked on DQL, Richard has become even more convinced of importance of providing control and other additional information.

We want to keep this information out of the query language primarily to keep the model theory for query clean and simple. Peter referred to this as a "Platonic version of querying", to which specific interfaces can be defined.

KQML and OKBC support such additional information regarding packaging of results and resource consumption.

There was a discussion about plurality, e.g. creating a bag within the query to contain a set of results, rather than depending upon external mechanisms to return multiple sets of results. While theoretically clean, this may be cumbersome for developers.

The representation of the query, additional information, and results remains an open issue. See Pat's previous message.

Ian expressed the view that daml:List is primarily intended to define the language itself, and should generally not be used in applications because of its limited semantics.

There was a discussion about "anonymous objects" (e.g. inferred objects, such as the unnamed father associated with a Person) and whether queries should return them. There was general agreement that a reasoner shouldn't export internal names, only constants in the KB or underlying representation, however Pat advised us not to underestimate the "evil ingenuity of logic programmers".

We revisited the issues (primarily monotonicity vs. practicality) with supporting queries such as direct subClassOf.

Pat noted that we should distinguish between querying databases vs. knowledge bases.

Next Week

We'll continue the query discussion and look at the XML Query Data Model and language (e.g. its FLWR data flow model).

Links

IRC
Kelly Barber's raw notes
last week's minutes
Joint Committee home page

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