HotDAML Newsletter - Issue 8

From: John Flynn (jflynn@bbn.com)
Date: 08/23/02


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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Friday, August 23rd, 2002 - Issue 8
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New Stories:

Web Ontology Working Drafts Published

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Ontology Working Group has released
three first working drafts describing the Web Ontology Language (OWL) 1.0
and its subset OWL Light. DAML+OIL was the starting point for OWL and you
will note the marked similarity. The Feature Synopsis
<http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-owl-features-20020729/> , Abstract Syntax
<http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-owl-absyn-20020729/>  and Language Reference
<http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-owl-ref-20020729/>  documents describe OWL and
OWL Light.


OWL Validator (Vowlidator) is Available

A validator has been developed by Dave Rager at BBN Technologies to allow
OWL developers to verify their markup. The Vowlidator is a tool to check OWL
markup for problems beyond simple syntax errors. The Vowlidator reads in
your OWL file and examines it for a variety of potential errors. It then
provides you with a listing of errors, a pointer to the error in your file,
and some guidance on the nature of the problem. (
http://192.233.49.21/vowlidator/)


Convert DAML+OIL to OWL Online

The W3C Web Ontology Working Group has released OWL, a draft of a proposed
web recommendation based on DAML+OIL. Although very similar to DAML+OIL, OWL
does have a few changes. The University of Maryland is pleased to announce
an online converter that can take as input a DAML file and will produce the
corresponding OWL. As the OWL recommendation matures, the converter will be
updated to track the most recent changes. The converter is currently
available at http://www.mindswap.org/~golbeck/owl.html


New Version of DAML Services Due for Release

A new version, version 0.7, of DAML-S (DAML for Services) is scheduled for
release on August 30, 2002. Version 0.7 introduces the Grounding ontology,
and includes some refinements to the Profile and Process Model ontologies.
In addition, a new example of a Profile-based (yellow-pages style) service
taxonomy is presented, and the existing service examples have been made more
complete. The services ontology includes three major subdivisions, those
dealing with profiles, process models, and groundings. Roughly speaking, a
service profile describes "what the service does"; for purposes such as
advertisement, discovery, and matchmaking; a process model describes "how
the service works"; for uses such as automatic invocation, composition, and
monitoring of services, a grounding provides the details of "how to access
the service". The new Grounding ontology ties DAML-S in with the Web
Services Description Language (WSDL), an emerging, collaborative industry
effort that is currently the focus of a W3C working group. DAML-S release
0.7 will be made available at http://www.daml.org/services/ .


Prototype DAMLRuleML to JESS Translator Available

There is now an available prototype of RuleML in DAML+OIL syntax, and
translation between this DamlRuleML (or RuleML in ordinary XML) to Jess. The
prototype includes using Jess to perform inference in DamlRuleML (or
RuleML). The site is maintained by Mahesh Gandhe who did this work for his
UMBC masters thesis under the supervision of Benjamin Grosof of the MIT
Slone School of Management and Tim Finin of the University of Maryland,
Baltimore County. ( http://userpages.umbc.edu/~mgandh1/)


Tools Available From the Semantic Web Research Group

The Semantic Web Research Group is a group of people working with Semantic
Web technology inside the Mind Lab at the University of Maryland Institute
for Advanced Computer Studies. They have released the following tools:
SMORE – Semantic Markup, Ontology and RDF Editor; RIC – RDF Instance
Creator; ConverToRDF – Convert delimited text files to RDF/DAML; and RDF
Screen Scraper. ( http://www.mindswap.org/)



DAML at conferences

Adam Pease and Richard Fikes ran the AAAI-2002 workshop on Ontologies and
the Semantic Web.  Richard Fikes gave the keynote address, providing an
overview of the semantic web.  David Martin gave an invited talk on the
DAML-S effort.  Papers and presentations from the workshop are available at
http://projects.teknowledge.com/AAAI-2002/

Stephen Reed presented the paper "Mapping Ontologies into Cyc" by Stephen L.
Reed and Douglas B. Lenat at the AAAI 2002 Conference workshop on Ontologies
for the Semantic Web. Regarding OpenCyc, over 25,000 copies have been
downloaded from SourceForge.

A paper was given at the International Semantic Web Conference on the
subject of Consistency Checking of Semantic Web Ontologies. The authors
were: Kenneth Baclawski, Mieczyslaw M. Kokar, Richard Waldinger and Paul A.
Kogut.

Work on DAML-S has been well represented at conferences in recent months.
At the 1st International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2002), in Sardinia in
June, there were five papers describing either DAML-S itself, or work based
on DAML-S.  These papers were authored by DAML-S collaborators
(alphabetically by institution): Mark Burstein of BBN; Anupriya Ankolenkar,
Massimo Paolucci, Terry R. Payne, Rahul Singh, and Katia Sycara of CMU; Ora
Lassila of Nokia; Jerry R. Hobbs, David Martin, and Srini Narayanan of SRI;
Sheila A. McIlraith of Stanford; and Drew McDermott of Yale. In addition,
Sycara and Payne joined forces with Christoph Bussler (Oracle Corp.)and
Dieter Fensel (Vrije Universiteit) to present a day-long workshop on
Semantic Web services, in which DAML-S was described in some detail. The
timeliness of this work on Web services was also emphasized by an ISWC2002
invited talk, "The Grid, Grid Services and the Semantic Web: Technologies
and Opportunities" given by Carl Kesselman, of USC / Information Sciences
Institute. Sycara, Payne, and colleagues have also presented a tutorial and
paper on Semantic Web Services at the The First International Joint
Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS), in
Barcelona in July.

Overview presentations of DAML-S were given at two workshops at The
Eighteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2002), in
July in Edmonton, by David Martin. An overview presentation of DAML-S and
DAML-Enabled Web Service Composition was given by McIlraith at the Fourth
International Bi-Conference Workshop on Agent-Oriented Information Systems
(AOIS-2002), May, 2002 as part of the CAiSE 2002 Conference. McIlraith and
Dieter Fensel joined forces  to present a 1/2 day tutorial on Semantic
Enabled Web Services at the XML-Web Services One Conference and Expo
"Development Solutions for the Enterprise", June 7, 2002 in San Jose,
California.  DAML-S was featured.

DAML-S was also featured in April and early May at WWW11 (Eleventh
International World Wide Web Conference), KR2002 (Eighth International
Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning), AIPS'02
Workshops (Sixth International Conference on AI Planning & Scheduling) and
NMR2002 (Ninth International Workshop on Nonmonotonic Reasoning).

Nearly all of these recent publications are listed on the DAML-S home page:
http://www.daml.org/services/.

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