From: pat hayes ([email protected])
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
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