Joint Committee Minutes 28 November 2000

This page summarizes the telecon for the Joint US/EU Committee on Agent Markup Languages held from 1300 to 1400 PST on 28 November 2000. These minutes were prepared by the chairman, and were approved during the 19 December telecon.

Participants

Announcements

Jim Hendler announced the Joint Committee to [email protected]. A public site is now available.

W3C is reportedly discussing a proposal for a Semantic Web Activity at its Advisory Council meeting this week. A vote of the W3C membership will be conducted in December, with a decision by the Director (Tim) in January. W3C Proposals are members-only, but a public abstract is being developed for IETF.

Last Week's Minutes

Frank van Harmelen had a minor correction; otherwise the minutes were approved.

EU Semantic Web Technologies Workshop

Ian reported on the Workshop held last week in Luxembourg. DAML and OIL were mentioned prominently.

"DAML-M"

Mike Dean brought up the concept of having standard language constructs to describe ontology mappings, which has been discussed during several of his visits to DAML technology developers. Having a standard set of language constructs would allow a clean separation between tools to identify mappings and tools to execute translations, and also provide a means to provide guidance to automated mapping discovery tools. equivalentTo is a starting point.

Jeff Heflin discussed ontology mappings in SHOE. Renaming and rules can cover a lot of the space, but can't handle issues such as unit-of-measure conversions (due to a lack of arithmetic). Bi-directional mappings require 2 rules.

OIL uses an approach similar to SHOE, but allows explicit uni- or bi-directional mappings.

DC Meeting

The following people have confirmed their plans for next week's meeting in DC

There was consensus that it would be useful to schedule some background briefings on SHOE, RDF/RDFS, and OIL, covering rationale, debates, limitations, future plans, and other issues not found in the published descriptions.

Tools

Ian announced OILed, a Protege-like editor for OIL/DAML with a connection to a reasoning engine.

Jeff Heflin announced that his SHOE tools are now open source and available for download.

Deb announced that Ontolingua and Chimaera now support input of DAML-ONT, OIL, and RDFS. They also support DAML-ONT output and could easily support OIL and RDFS output as well.

Stefan announced an XMI to DAML-O conversion tool.

We should see demos of these tools in DC next week.

There was consensus that we should defer publically announcing these tools to www-rdf-logic until after we decide on upcoming language versioning next week.

Links

Kelly Barber's raw notes
last week's minutes

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