Re: A comment on DAML FAQ

From: Deborah Mcguinness (dlm@ksl.stanford.edu)
Date: 06/05/01


Good points pat.

In followup to the discussion in today's meeting the following two
additional sources of information on how to use daml-like systems follow:

The first is how to use a kl-one-like system  (or how to use a simple dl
system)

Ronald J. Brachman, Alex Borgida, Deborah L. McGuinness, Peter F.
Patel-Schneider, and Lori Alperin Resnick. ``Living with CLASSIC: When
and How to Use a KL-ONE-Like Language.'' In Principles of Semantic
Networks: Explorations in the representation of knowledge, ed. John Sowa.
San Mateo, California: Morgan Kaufmann, 1991, pages 401--456.

I just put up an abstract page for it that points to the postscript
version peter has up:
http://www.ksl.Stanford.EDU/people/dlm/papers/living-with-classic-abstract.html

Also, we used the examples in this paper to provide an ontology tutorial
aimed more at protege than any other system.    one could think of this
as how to build a first ontology using a language with at least medium
level expressive power.

ref:
Natalya Fridman Noy and Deborah L. McGuinness. ``Ontology Development
101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology''. Stanford Knowledge
Systems Laboratory Technical Report KSL-01-05 and Stanford Medical
Informatics Technical Report SMI-2001-0880, March 2001.

abstract (with pointers) is up at:
http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/people/dlm/papers/ontology-tutorial-noy-mcguinness-abstract.html

d

pat hayes wrote:

> 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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--
 Deborah L. McGuinness
 Knowledge Systems Laboratory
 Gates Computer Science Building, 2A Room 241
 Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-9020
 email: dlm@ksl.stanford.edu
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