From: pat hayes (phayes@ai.uwf.edu)
Date: 05/30/01
Q: Do I need a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence to use DAML? A: No. The designers of DAML are seeking to merge experience gained from their collective work in Knowledge Representation and other AI fields, the World Wide Web, software development, and military and commercial applications to provide a language and tools that balance usability and power. That answer is a bit of a cop-out. The fact is that DAML in its present form is *not* easy to learn or to follow. Many of its constructs are fairly abstruse (I'm thinking in particular of the min/maxCardinalityQ). The restriction/onProperty/toClass way of talking is not given by God to all right-thinking people, but is an idiosyncratic perspective limited to those familiar with the, er, classical class languages. It still makes my head hurt. So I think the honest answer might be more like "No, but it sure would help, and you had better know a bit about object-oriented class-inheritance languages." But more seriously, surely the first FAQ should be something like "what use is DAML to me?" or "What should I use DAML for?" or some such. The FAQ right now doesnt seem to actually say what DAML really is in any sharp sense. For example, we might point out that the 'class/property' way of talking has been widely used in Krep and is closely linked to things like data modelling languages, just to kind of locate this whole enterprise in some kind of intellectual space. Before asking why not use XML, something should explain the relationships of DAML to RDF(S) and XML. Pat --------------------------------------------------------------------- IHMC (850)434 8903 home 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office Pensacola, FL 32501 (850)202 4440 fax phayes@ai.uwf.edu http://www.coginst.uwf.edu/~phayes
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