HotDAML Newsletter - Issue 4

From: John Flynn (jflynn@bbn.com)
Date: 09/05/01


HotDAML Newsletter
Keeping you up to speed on happenings in the world of DAML
http://www.daml.org <http://www.daml.org/>
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Tuesday, September 4, 2001 - Issue 4
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New Stories:
New DARPA DAML Program Manager
As of 4 September, 2001 Murray Burke has taken over the reigns as the DARPA
Program Manager for the DAML effort.
The founder of the DAML program, <a
href="http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler"> Dr. James Hendler </a> is
returning to the University of Maryland where he will be a full professor in
the Computer Science department and Director of Semantic Web and Agent
Technologies at the new Maryland Information and Network Dynamics
Laboratory.
Prof. James Hendler Head, Adv. Info. Technology Lab
301-405-2696 (phone) Dept of Computer Science
301-405-8488 (fax) University of Maryland
http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hendler College Park, MD 20742
DAML.ORG Goes Over 1,000,000 Hits
The official web site for the DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) is hosted
at the DARPA Technology Integration Center in the DAML Laboratory. Most of
the content on the site is in XML and/or DAML format and is rendered for
viewing via XML Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT). The site has
been active for approximately one year and during the week of 20 August the
DAML web site received its one millionth hit. The site can be accessed via
http://www.daml.org <http://www.daml.org/>  or http://www.daml.net
<http://www.daml.net/>
Semantic Web for Military Users
The second Semantic Web for Military Users conference is planned for 12 –13
September, 2001. Potential military users of DAML technology will meet to
discuss how the use of DAML could enhance specific military projects.
Conference attendance is by invitation only and will be hosted by Dr. David
Aha at the Naval Research Laboratory. Information on the first Semantic Web
for Military Users conference can be found at
http://www.daml.org/meetings/2001/06/swmeeting.html

Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) DAML Transition

On 27-29 August, 2001, AFRL and several principal investigators from the
DAML program (BBN, SRI, and DRC) attended a very productive knowledge
acquisition session at the Air Mobility Command (AMC) Diplomatic Clearance
Office, Scott Air Force Base, Ill. The "DIP" office is responsible for
requesting diplomatic clearances for all AMC flights crossing foreign
borders, using a complicated set of request constraints provided by the DoD
Foreign Clearance Guide (FCG). The goals of the AFRL DAML transition project
are: 1) to make the FCG machine-readable to ensure timely and accurate
clearance requests, and thereby reduce diplomatic clearance "incidents"
(flights being turned back at foreign borders due to improper clearances),
and 2) To exercise the entire DAML lifecycle and associated tools for
ontology development, source mark-up, and application development using a
carefully scoped AMC application. For more information, please contact the
AFRL Program Manager, Mark Gorniak <mailto:gorniakm@rl.af.mil> .

OntoMat Beta Release Announced
It is an initial beta release of OntoMat, an interative tool for generating
DAML annotations for web pages. OntoMat is aimed at end-users who wish to
enrich their pages with DAML metadata. The Java based tool includes both an
ontology browser and a HTML browser that will display the annotated text.
The user creates annotations using a drag-and-drop interface. The tool is
extensible using a plugin architecture.
http://ontobroker.semanticweb.org/annotation/ontomat/index.html


Software Services Grid Workshop

A summit meeting was held between OMG, W3C and the scientific computing Grid
community to discuss the recent proliferation of modeling and metadata
standards. Presentation topics include the OMG Model Driven Architecture,
Common Warehouse Metamodel, Semantic Web and DAML-S. Proceedings are
available at
http://www.omg.org/news/meetings/tc/software_services_grid_workshop.htm


AeroDAML is now available on the Web

AeroDAML automatically generates some basic DAML annotation. When you enter
a webpage URI, it extracts some common entities and relationships from text
and links them to appropriate DAML classes and properties. A user could then
manually refine the AeroDAML output by adding more semantic relationships.
You can try AeroDAML at
http://ubot.lockheedmartin.com/ubot/hotdaml/aerodaml.html


Initial Version of an XML To DAML Translator Announced

The XML To DAML Translator, developed by Booz Allen, allows users to convert
XML schema into DAML. DTD and XML content translation are work in progress.
All major XML schema components are supported including import. Other
capabilities such as element substitution groups are not currently
supported. This tool along with an accompanying ppt slide presentation is
available at
http://www.davincinetbook.com:8080/daml/xmltodaml/xmltodaml.html . The
relationship between the XML to DAML translator and ontology
translation/mapping tools is as follows: The intent is to decouple the
process of XML to DAML translation from the process of DAML ontology
translation/mapping. The two processes can be combined by piping the results
of XML to DAML translation into DAML ontology translation/mapping. Each XML
schema/DTD gets its own new DAML ontology that is then mapped to existing
DAML ontologies.


DReggie: Enabling Semantic Service Discovery using DAML

The University of Maryland, Baltimore County has been developing a dynamic
service discovery infrastructure using DAML. The main goal of the project is
to enhance existing service discovery mechanisms. Current service discovery
mechanisms use simple attribute or interface matching techniques at the
syntactic level. DAML possesses the ability to express the essential
functionality, input and output behavior, constraints and functional
limitations of different web-services in a machine-understandable format.
This allows service discovery to be performed at a semantic level. DAML is
used to describe different web-services and enhancements over the Jini
service discovery architecture have been implemented. Semantic service
matching improves the probability of a "successful" match for service
discovery requests. Semantic matching involves reasoning about services that
may result in inexact or approximate service matches, which are also
considered to be a success. Any service that registers with the enhanced
Jini Lookup Service registers a DAML description entry for itself. A client
using the enhanced lookup process submits a DAML description of its request.
A simple Java matching module and a complex prolog-matching module are used
for matching service discovery requests with service descriptions. A DAML
ontology was created to describe services in terms of their functionality,
capability, platform requirements and other attributes. The ontology is
available online at http://www.daml.umbc.edu/ontologies/dreggie-ont.daml .
More information about the project can be obtained from the paper "DReggie:
Semantic Service Discovery for M-Commerce Applications"
http://daml.umbc.edu/papers/dreggie.pdf


DAML Query Relevance Assessor

Booz Allen & Hamilton is developing a Query Relevance Assessor to exploit
DAML semantics to greatly enhance the accuracy and precision of WWW
information retrieval. It relevance ranks DAML mark-up with respect to query
terms by exploiting the wealth of contextual knowledge contained within
ontology classes, properties and their instances. It performs this task when
only minimal query term context may be available and achieves a minimal loss
of semantic information by exhaustively examining all DAML semantic
information. The tool borrows term weighting techniques from the field of
information retrieval by identifying the analogues of free text documents
within the DAML context to be DAML objects including ontology classes,
properties and instances. This gives rise to what one may call a DAML
semantic feature space quantifying the semantic relationships between DAML
objects and hence the possibility of applying machine learning methods to
the Web in ways not possible before. Briefing and poster at:
http://www.davincinetbook.com:8080/daml/servlets/frame.html


DAML at Conferences
Horus, which uses DAML technology, was successfully deployed and
demonstrated at Intelink2001 in St. Louis, MO on August 27 - 29. The Horus
capability was characterized as the first end-to-end version of a Semantic
Web.


Deborah McGuinness gave the keynote talk on the future of the web at the
IEEE International Conference on Communications held in Helsinki, Finland on
June 11 – 14, 2001.  http://www.icc2001.com/main/index.html

Semantic Web Working Symposium (SWWS) 2001 was held at Stanford University
on July 30 – August 1, 2001. DAML+OIL was a key discussion topic at this
symposium.   http://www.semanticweb.org/SWWS/

The 2001 International Workshop on Description Logics (DL2001) was held at
Stanford University on August 1 – August 3, 2001 and included talks on
DAML+OIL.  http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/dl2001/



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