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Tim Finin |
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University of Maryland |
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Baltimore County |
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Semantic Web for
the Military User |
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June 6, 2001 |
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ITTALKS web application |
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Two advanced capabilities |
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How does DAML help? |
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What’s needed to build apps? |
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Joint work with JHU/APL and MIT/Sloan. |
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See http://umbc.edu/~finin/swmu/ for slides |
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UMBC, JHU, and MIT are working together on a set
of issues under funding from DARPA |
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UMBC (Finin, et. al.) is focused on integrating
communicating agents, DAML and the Web |
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JHU APL (Mayfield, et. al.) is building
information indexing and retrieval systems that work with documents and
queries that contain a mixture of free text, XML and DAML |
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MIT Sloan School (Grosof et. al.) is developing
techniques for integrating rule based technology and distributed belief
into DAML |
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To be integrated in agent-based applications
involving search and using rule-based reasoning. |
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ITTALKS is a database driven web
site of IT related talks at UMBC and
other institutions. The database
contains information on |
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Seminar events |
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People (speakers, hosts, users, …) |
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Places (rooms, institutions, …) |
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This database is used to dynamically generate
web pages and DAML descriptions for the talks and related information and
serves as a focal point for agent-based services relating to these talks. |
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We are exploring how the semantic web and DAML
add value to this web-based application |
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We’ve defined and use the following ontologies,
all at http://daml.umbc.edu/ontologies/ |
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calendar-ont.daml – calendar and schedule info |
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classification.daml – ACM CCS topics |
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person-ont.daml – people and their attributes |
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place-ont.daml – talk locations |
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profile-ont.daml – user modeling info |
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talk-ont.daml – talks info |
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topic-ont.daml – topics and interests |
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Generation from DB to DAML and HTML mediated by
MySQL, Java servlets, and JSP. |
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Generation of DAML descriptions and user profiles from HTML forms. |
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Creation & use of DAML-encoded user
models describing interests and ontology extensions. |
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Ontologies for events, people, places, schedules, topics, etc. |
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Automatic HTML form (pre) filling from DAML. |
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Syncing of talks with Palm calendars via Coola. |
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Automatic classification of talks into topic
ontology |
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A XSB-based DAML/RDF reasoning engine. |
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I’ll briefly describe two advanced capabilities
facilitated by DAML: |
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Classifying talk topics and user interests using
DAML ontologies |
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Using DAML as a communication language among
software agents |
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Currently, talks manually
entered through a web
form interface |
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Several things help: (i)
recognizing entities, e.g.
people) already in the database and (ii) text classification |
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Goal: become for research talks what NEC
CiteSeer is for research papers |
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Focused search engine to collect talk
announcements in text or HTML or marked up in a partially understood
ontology. |
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Information extraction using LMCO’s Aerotext to
extract relevant talk parameters and enter into database |
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Topic hierarchies provide
indexing terms |
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ACM CCS topic hierarchy |
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Open Directory |
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Encoded as DAML ontologies |
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These allow users to specify interests as well
as browse the database of talks by topic |
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Automatic classification of talks (based on
title and abstract) and users (based on his web pages, CV, papers, etc.) |
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Discovery of mapping rules between CCS to OD
ontologies using IR techniques |
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Much multi-agent systems work is grounded in
Agent Communication Languages (e.g.,
KQML, FIPA) and associated software infrastructure such as the DARPA
Grid |
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The paradigm has been peer-to-peer message
oriented communication mediated by brokers and facilitators. |
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The DAML program invites different paradigms
which will require some changes in ACLs and their associates software
systems. |
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Agents “publish” beliefs, requests, and other
“speech acts” on web pages. |
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Agents “discover” what peers have published on
the web. |
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The software agent research community is very
interested in the semantic web and DAML |
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ITTALKS offers a web interface for its human
users and can send notifications to humans via email, WAP and SMS. |
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We are also developing an agent API so that
software agents can interact with ITTALKS. |
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Currently, the ITTALKS agent can send
notifications to agents via KQML using DAML as the “content language”. |
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We will support richer, mixed initiative dialogs
between ITTALKS and agents in the future |
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Does it Help? Yes |
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We’ve identified five general areas in which
DAML adds value to the application or facilitates building or maintaining
the application |
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Is DAML needed?
No |
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Not strictly (yet), although the alternative
technologies are not designed for the web and thus suffer from
deficiencies. |
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Where does SW markup come from? |
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From Databases, just like much of the HTML on
today’s web |
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But, where does the DB content come from? |
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From legacy systems |
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From web forms or custom HCIs |
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From focused search engines feeding into web
scrapers or information extraction apps |
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Are the DAML tools there? |
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Some in beta form |
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Many XML and RDF tools are very handy |
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We used protégé and XMLSpy to create and edit
ontologies |
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ITTALKS is a useful, fairly sophisticated web
application |
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The semantic web concepts and DAML in particular |
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Make it easier to develop and maintain ITTALKS |
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Support some features of ITTALKS |
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Visit http://ittalks.org/ |
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To use ITTALKS |
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For more information, including a paper, a demo
“movie”, and these slides |
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mailto:[email protected] to request a domain for
your organization. |
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Notes