DAML-S Release Status

The current "pre-release" version 0.7 of DAML-S is an incomplete draft version, intended for review and comment from within the DAML, Semantic Web, Web services, and other relevant communities.

What's New or Changed in This Release

This release (0.7) was announced October 11, 2002. Although we try to avoid making substantive changes to an announced release, occasionally we do provide minor clarifications or corrections to released material. These changes (that is, changes made since the release announcement) are informally summarized here.

Grounding.daml

date: 2003/01/10 01:24:23;  
changed damlsParameter from Datatype to Object property

ProfileHierarchy.daml

date: 2003/02/05
changed several incorrect uses of "toValue" to "hasValue"
(change due to www-ws message from Vera Zaychik)

CongoProcess.daml

date: 2003/01/10 23:23:24;
added property putInCartBookISBN (previously the process had an
incomplete use of "input")
(change due to www-ws message from Monika Solanki)

CongoProcessDataFlow.daml

date: 2003/01/23 00:20:08;  
fixed a comment, replaced #input with #putInCartBookISBN
(both due to www-ws messages from Monika Solanki)

CongoGrounding.daml

date: 2003/01/10 01:57:47;
eliminated a stray double-quote (Massimo)

date: 2003/03/06 06:19:21;
now using rdf:resource attributes with damlsParameter
now specifying xsd:uriReference rdf:value= where appropriate
(Massimo)

BravoAirGrounding.daml

date: 2003/01/10 01:23:22;
various changes from Massimo, Naveen, Takuya at CMU.
clean-up of ENTITY definitions
lots of detailed formatting fixes

What's New or Changed Since 0.6

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 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.

The Profile

Changes to the Profile ontology are summarized here: profileChanges.html.

The Process Model

Coming soon ...

The Grounding Ontology

New material for 0.7.

Deprecated Constructs

Service.daml

isPresentedBy replaced by presentedBy
isDescribedBy replaced by describedBy
isSupportedBy replaced by supportedBy

Profile.daml

See profileChanges.html.

Miscellaneous

Removed minCardinality of 1 from service:presents

What's Missing

This release of DAML-S is missing several notable components that will be added in subsequent releases. In particular

Semantics for DAML-S
Although a formal semantics for DAML-S is not currently included as part of this release, work has been done towards providing both an axiomatic semantics and an operational semantics. The former work is described in
- Narayanan, S. and McIlraith, S., "Simulation, Verification and Automated Composition of Web Services",
and the latter, in
- Anupriya Ankolekar, Frank Huch, Katia Sycara, "Concurrent Execution Semantics for DAML-S with Subtypes",
both of which may be accessed at http://www.daml.org/services/.
Process Control Ontology
In the technical overview section, we identified 4 tasks to be performed by agents. The fourth task, execution monitoring, requires further markup of services. In a subsequent release we will include a process control ontology to provide markup in support of this task.
Conversational Protocol
The current DAML-S definitions are insufficiently clear about how to specify the precise communication patterns that are to take place in carrying out a service (that is, the patterns of messages that are to be exchanged between service participants). However, we believe that the process ontology already provides a basis for specifying these patterns, and it is likely that these specifications will not require many additional new constructs.

Known Limitations

The Process Model

Coming soon ...

The Grounding Ontology

Coming soon ...

Examples

BravoAir process model
The BravoAir process model is somewhat less complete than the Congo process model. It lacks: inputs/outputs for composite processes (but they can be inferred from the sub processes); indication of argument bindings between subprocesses.