From: Jim Hendler (hendler@cs.umd.edu)
Date: 04/04/02
At 2:35 PM +0000 4/4/02, Lemmer John F Civ AFRL/IFTB wrote: >As a potenial DAML +OIL user, but one who will probably not go that >route, here is my 2 cents worth. Every new thing like DAML exits >somewhere in a tradeoff between academic elegance and practical >utility. From what I see of DAML, it is way to far from utility and >way to close to (attempted) elegance. > >It seems DAML is re-fighting (and still not winning) the wars the KR >community has been struggling with for at least the last 20 years. > > >john It is so good to see our Air Force researcher lab staff so open-mindedly examining a new technology - I hope that this will not come back to haunt them during AFSAB reviews. I'd love to hear from John why he thinks that DAML is not winning - I cannot remember another AI language that ever has had so much public interest, web use, and moved into standardization by a major body -- in fact, in hype we probably lag behind the old expert systems days, but in acceptance we seem to be moving beyond and winning acceptance. Perhaps the military seems to be moving slow (as usual), but the Web Ontology Working Group includes such small companies as Intel, Daimler-Chrysler, EDS, Fujitsu, HP, Intel, Lucent, Nokia, Philips Electronics, and Unisys -- with a couple of other big players talking to me about joining. There's also a rumor around that IBM Research has included Semantic Web-related work in their strategic plan -- in short, we're seeing a positive interest that had not been seen in this way in the past (except maybe for the expert systems days - which all these companies, and many of the rest of the Fortune 500, are using regularly). Perhaps John's message helps explain why Air Force F-16s are flying with 240,000 lines of Jovial code in their controllers and why the DoD is still maintaining that Corba, not Java, is the language of the future... -JH p.s. John - you're lucky I'm not the PM anymore - if you sent a messgae like the above when I was PM you'd be looking for another program to support. -- Professor James Hendler hendler@cs.umd.edu Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies 301-405-2696 Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab. 301-405-6707 (Fax) AV Williams Building, Univ of Maryland College Park, MD 20742 http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler
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