HotDAML Newsletter - Issue 5

From: John Flynn (jflynn@bbn.com)
Date: 11/28/01


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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Wednesday, November 28, 2001 - Issue 5
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New Stories:

W3C announces Web Ontology Working Group based on DAML+OIL

The World Wide Web Consortium, the body that is responsible for many current
web languages such as XML and RDF, has decided to start a Working Group to
develop a recommendation for a web ontology language. The charter of this
group cites DAML+OIL as a starting point for this language reading "The
March 2001 DAML+OIL specification, discussed in some detail below, serves as
an example of an ontology language - a comparison of DAML+OIL to XML,
XML-schema, and RDF-Schema is available...The Working Group shall start by
evaluating the technical solutions proposed in the DAML+OIL draft. "  Jim
Hendler, the former Program Manager for the DAML program, will chair the new
working group.  See http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/WebOnt for more information.

RETSINA Semantic Web Calendar Agent V1.06a announced
The Semantic Web Calendar Agent developed by CMU parses and presents
Semantic Web schedule and event information (marked up in RDF and DAML),
provides integration with MS Outlook 2000, and interoperates with other
agent systems. Schedules (such as class or conference schedules) that are
marked up using the Hybrid RDF Calendar Ontology and Dublin Core Ontology
can be browsed and imported directly into Outlook’s calendar, and reminders
can be scheduled to notify users and other agents of imminent meetings
(e.g., reminders can be sent by the Calendar Agent to cell phones or other
devices). A semantic web browser offering context sensitive services, such
as abstracting information to email a meeting attendee or to browsing their
contact details, is included. Using KQML messages, the agent can be invoked
remotely to import and interactively explore the schedule, location and
contact information harvested as RDF and DAML markup.

An Alpha release of the Calendar Agent is available for Windows platforms
with Outlook 2000, at http://www.daml.ri.cmu.edu/Cal
<http://www.daml.ri.cmu.edu/Cal> . In addition, several sample schedules are
available at this url. An editor that supports DAML schedule markup will be
available shortly.


New version of DAML-S scheduled for release

A new version, version 0.6, of DAML-S (DAML for Services) is scheduled for
release on December 5, 2001. Version 0.6 will include a number of
refinements to the Service Profile and Process Model.  The Service Profile
is used to concisely represent the service, in terms of capabilities,
service provider information, and operational parameters (e.g. cost-of-use,
quality-of-service parameters, etc), and advertise the service with Web
Service Registries.  Improvements over DAML-S 0.5 include: clarification and
simplification of capability description parameters (i.e. inputs, outputs,
preconditions and effects), and a tighter integration with the process
model, as well as refinements necessary to facilitate automatic service
discovery through Matchmaking.

The Process Model now includes three subclasses of Process: AtomicProcess,
SimpleProcess, and CompositeProcess, and some new properties that
characterize the relationships between processes of these different types.
Among the other significant changes, the model allows for conditions on
outputs and effects of all processes, and for computed inputs, outputs,
effects, and preconditions associated with composite processes.  It also
includes a simplification of the representation of composite processes that
facilitate composite process encoding and manipulation.

The services ontology includes three major subdivisions, those dealing with
profiles, process models, and groundings.  Looking further ahead, version
1.0 will be released when work on groundings has been completed.  This
promises to tie DAML-S in with emerging industry service description
languages such as WSDL. DAML-S release 0.6 will be made available at
http://www.daml.org/services/.


Agentscities to use DAML+OIL

The European Union 5th Framework project Agentcities.RTD will be adopting
DAML+OIL as its initial ontology representation and expects to recommend it
for use in the wider Agentcities network. There are 14 partners in the
Agentcities.RTD project, around 50 planning to participate in a related
network project (Agentcities.NET), and a significant number of other
Agentcities activities around the world are currently active or planned.
For more information see:

http://www.agentcities.org <http://www.agentcities.org/> /EURTD/

Semantic Web for Military Users
The second Semantic Web for Military Users conference took place on 13 –14
November, 2001. Potential military users of DAML technology met to discuss
how the use of DAML could enhance specific military projects. The conference
was hosted by Dr. David Aha at the Naval Research Laboratory. Information on
the first and second Semantic Web for Military Users conferences can be
found at http://www.daml.org/meetings/.

DAML at conferences

Ken Baclawski presented "Extending UML to Support Ontology Engineering for
the Semantic Web" at the Fourth International Conference on UML (UML 2001)
held in Toronto on October 1-5 (see http://www.cs.toronto.edu/uml2001/). The
paper and presentation can be found at http://vis.home.mindspring.com/

The First International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP 2001) was
held in Victoria, B.C., Canada on October 21-23
(http://sern.ucalgary.ca/ksi/K-CAP/K-CAP2001/ ). DAML+OIL related research
was well represented at the main conference as well as the K-CAP 2001
Workshop on Knowledge Markup and Semantic Annotation. See
http://semannot2001.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/


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