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The language is now officially known as DAML+OIL, to reflect the major contributions of the (primarily European) developers of the Ontology Inference Layer (OIL).
XML vocabularies are generally fixed by a DTD or XML Schema definition. You can copy or include someone else's definition in your own, but can't add additional information to their definition. With DAML, you can add your own properties to classes defined by someone else.
XML can reference other elements in the same document using IDs; RDF and DAML can reference any resource on the WWW using URIs.
XML doesn't support inheritance, a key notion in object technologies. DAML supports multiple inheritance with both subclasses (e.g. Human may be a subclass of Animal) and subproperties (e.g. father may be a subproperty of parent).
DAML and XML can coexist peacefully.
Previous experience with XML will likely be a major benefit in learning and using DAML.
<head>).
See
here
for suggestions on embedding RDF/DAML inside HTML.
You may prefer to use an HTML link to associate a separate DAML page with your HTML page, e.g.
<link href="your-page.daml" rel="daml" type="text/daml">
(In the future, we expect to recommend specific vales for
rel
and
type).
For content (instances), several possible approaches include:
text/plain
is preferred for now
(so people can see your DAML).
Pending selection of the RDF MIME type by the
W3C RDF Core WG,
we may register an official MIME type
(such as text/daml)
with
IANA.
A wishlist of tools not yet available is available here.
The following are simple forms of ontologies, but generally contain less information than we try to capture in DAML ontologies:
Translators are also being developed to translate schemas/ontologies/models in other formats to DAML:
DAML adds the following capabilities beyond RDF/RDFS:
A comparison of language features is available here.