Joint Committee Minutes 13 November 2001

This page summarizes the telecon for the Joint US/EU Committee on Agent Markup Languages held from 1300 to 1400 PST on 13 November 2001. These minutes were prepared by Peter Patel-Schneider (who chaired this meeting in Mike Dean's absence) with some formatting by Mike Dean, and were approved during the 20 November telecon.

Participants

Announcements

Deborah is maintaining a repository for ``Tricks of the Trade''. Send mail to her (and cc joint-committee) with any additions you want.

Last Week's Minutes

The minutes from October 30 were approved by those present. We'll defer review of the November 6 minutes to next week.

DAML+OIL Submission

All the required information has been collected. Even the Lucent lawyers have responded. The pieces had passed the W3C style checkers and pass the ones that are working today. Peter re-submitted the package at 2pm EST today!

WebOnt

The W3C Web Ontology Working Group had its initial (mostly administrative) telecon yesterday, with about 40 participants. The next telecon will be in about two weeks. The first face-to-face meeting is scheduled at Bell Labs 14 and 15 January 2002.

DAML Rules

No action from Benjamin and Ian yet. Benjamin is supposed to be doing something. Harold says that RuleML is progressing, and moving from a DTD to an XML Schema base. There are technical problems to be overcome, particularly with inheritance in XML Schema. There are opportunities with respect to providing meaning for XML Schema and DTDs.

Harold, Benjamin, and others will have a Dagstuhl workshop on Rule Markup Techniques.

Richard thinks that rules + DAML is a high priority and is wondering why it is not progressing. What can be done to jump-start this? Several problems came to mind, including lack of concentrated effort and basic philosophy. Pat thinks that there are easy ways to progress, maybe not the best ways, however. Harold suggested a layered approach, which Ian says has problems.

The general consensus is that rules will take quite a while, particularly as there is little time pressure. One possibility, suggested by Richard is for the Joint Committee to put together an issue list.

DAML Query

Richard's issue list got considerable response from Pat and there is a new version. Pat raised the issue of blank responses and what sort of existentials they are (i.e, how to scope these variables over multiple queries).

Ian was concerned about the difficulty of inference, even with simple queries, particularly if counting is enabled. There was a long discussion on what a query processor has to do, i.e., will the query system be implementable at all. Richard thinks that many queries will be simple. Several different points on this issue were presented.

The next challenge is to devise a query system that can handle the simple cases without going off the deep end.

Richard wants responses.

Next Week

We'll plan to discuss the XML Query Data Model and further discuss Richard's issue list.

Links

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

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