Displeasure dissolving rapidly.

From: Jim Hendler (jhendler@darpa.mil)
Date: 05/02/01


DAML PIs
  A week ago I sent you all mail expressing disappointment with lack 
of ontology/DAML use.  In the week that followed my "butt kicking" 
(as one of your colleagues put it, although he used a stronger term) 
there's about 25% more ontologies in the repository and over 
1,000,000 more DAML Statements have been found by the crawler!  This 
is great.
  Obviously we didn't have a bunch of people suddenly create this 
stuff overnight, rather people submitted more of what they were 
working on, or hadn't got around to submitting yet,  or weren't quite 
"done" with, or etc.  It was my suspicion that this was happening -- 
and I think these numbers prove it.
  I'd really like to see this web site and its various repositories 
and etc. become an important part of the life of the DAML community. 
The awareness of what we are doing is growing at an amazing rate, and 
you all are in the vanguard of what really could be a "next big 
thing."  It would be nice if we could keep things moving without 
needing the yelling from the PM -- especially as the next PM may not 
be as nice as I am (Pat - that's a joke!!)
  Seriously, it makes it much easier for the PM to sell this program 
internally, as well as to promote it, when these numbers grow 
(example - I use graphs of the crawler outputs for my Director 
briefs), good things happen.
  Also, would be nice to continue to encourage your non-DAML-program 
colleagues who are doing ontology things in DAML to submit their work 
to the repository.  We're purposely keeping DAML as open as possible 
to encourage others to join us.  This includes students in classes 
who develop things, etc.
  Also, there's nothing wrong with putting new versions of existing 
things in the library (just number them appropriately) and things 
like that -- showing how these things evolve and grow is also 
important.
  The hit rate on our site is growing all the time - it's nice to keep 
it up to date.
  -Jim H.
p.s. And soon John Flynn will be asking you for new items for next 
DAML newsletter -- we are distributing this within DARPA, and the PMs 
cull from this for the periodic reports we send to our DoD lords and 
masters -- so appearing in this should be good visibility for you and 
a chance to be a "hero" within the DAML funding program -- so keep 
that in mind
Dr. James Hendler		jhendler@darpa.mil
Chief Scientist, DARPA/ISO	703-696-2238 (phone)
3701 N. Fairfax Dr.		703-696-2201 (Fax)
Arlington, VA 22203		http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hendler


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