A relatively new initiative is the DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) effort. It leverages XML and another W3C recommendation called the Resource Description Framework or RDF. The current release of DAML focuses on the creation of ontologies. The word ontology seems to be intimidating to some people, possibly because of its long historical association with philosophy and a lot of pretty heady discourse on the concept of existence.  Ontologies, as used here, are the concepts and relationships that describe sets of information. DAML provides a formal, machine-readable language for describing these relationships in a way that agents can work with.
	We talked earlier about the concept of the Semantic Web where information will be represented in machine readable form and agents will be able to do many tasks to increase our productivity. The W3C is vigorously pursuing the definition of the language recommendation that will be used to implement the Semantic Web and DAML is an active participant in that process. Although useable in its current release, DAML is still under development and will be adding additional features such as logic and rules constructs to give agents additional power.
	A limitation in using DAML today is that the tools needed to make it easy to use, such as high-level markup editors and DAML-enhanced search engines, are still emerging.