DAML
Agent Semantic Communications Service (ASCS)
Teknowledge
Adam Pease, John Li, Bhanu Vasireddy, Jeff Vu, Joe Marcelino
[apease | jli]@teknowledge.com
February 13, 2002

Accomplishments
Scaleable DAML-based search engine
Answers to queries, not pages
Experiments to quantify performance
Includes translation between ontologies
Includes simple inferences to broaden queries
Query continuation
Deployed at: (first deployed end of September) http://plucky.teknowledge.com/daml/damlquery.jsp
Downloadable as a zip file for local installation on http://reliant.teknowledge.com/DAML/
Large ontologies in DAML, DAML-KIF translator
Financial ontology to Horus
Financial Instrument, Financial Contract, Currency Measure, etc
Example commercial application

Site Traffic

Slide 4

Architecture

Process
Weekly update process
Crawling
Pre-processing
Inference caching into tables
Deployment
Done via automated scripts

Architecture

Architecture

Broadening Search
samePropertyAs, sameClassAs, (sameIndividualAs)
inverseOf
Search for (?X childOf ?Y) should also return results when content is coded as  (?Y parentOf ?X)
subPropertyOf, subClassOf
Generalization and specialization
Search is ordered so exact matches are returned first and broadening happens next

Solving the Nitty-Gritty
Ontology references can have typos
DAML is mixed with XML and HTML and all may be malformed
Sites change, are unavailable for short, long and permanent periods
Massive amounts of content – space and time efficiency issues
53,000 pages, 3.7 million DAML statements, 800MB crawled DB size
Currently using SirPac, exploring JENA

Experimentation/Metrics
Quantitative Experiments not “Existence proofs”
Metrics include: search time on different queries, inter-agent communication speed (as mediated by ASCS), correctness of the translation, semantic complexity of source and target communication

Large Ontologies
WordNet in DAML
10,000 pages each with 10-100 DAML statements
IEEE Standard Upper Ontology (proposal)
Large, free, general purpose, formal, peer-reviewed
People are free to reuse all or part of the content
A resource to speed creation of good ontologies and avoid reinvention
~2000 DAML statements
http://ontology.teknowledge.com

TekPortal + DAML
Financial ontology in DAML (and built on the SUO proposal)
DAML encoded aggregation displays
DAML markup of bond sites
Ontology translation
Crawl and index bond sites
Dynamic search, translation, advice

Request for Content Creators
Use rdfs:label to give human-readable labels to all items
Use sameClassAs and samePropertyAs to relate your ontology to others

Plans (activity and delivery)
Fully implement distributed architecture
Determine how to partition the DAML search space
One ontology per agent or several?
Improve speed and space efficiency
Supply search and translation agents for DAML experiment
Some manual ontology mapping
Semi-automated discovery of translations
Deployment of client and server-based search agents
Multi-user DAML-based advice server
Improved general search interface
New version will be deployed as well as posted for download every 3 months
Use RuleML for ontology mapping