Joint Committee Minutes 7-8 December 2000

Discussion details and action items can be found in the Links below.

Participants

• Tim Berners-Lee (called in Thursday afternoon)
• Dan Connolly
• Mike Dean
• Frank van Harmelen
• Jeff Heflin
• Jim Hendler (except Thursday morning)
• Ian Horrocks
• Ora Lassila
• Deb McGuinness

Background

• Jeff Heflin: SHOE (link TBD)
• Ora Lassila: RDF
• Ian Horrocks: OIL

Demonstrations

Deb McGuinness gave a demo of Chimaera's diagnostics for DAML-ONT and OIL ontologies.

Charter and Committee Evolution

1. We anticipate that W3C will convene a Working Group (probably the RDF Schema Working Group) to develop an ontology language
2. We will package up our then-current language specification (more below) and contribute it to the Working Group
3. We anticipate that W3C will convene a public Interest Group (probably www-rdf-logic) to focus longer-term on rules and logic.
4. We will proceed in parallel with the Interest Group, providing it with drafts and experimental results as they become available. Many committee members are likely to join the Interest Group. Since the W3C Interest Group would be public, membership in the Joint Committee can be limited to government funded US and EU Semantic Web participants plus invited experts. Other groups and activities may similarly contribute to the W3C Interest Group.

Many people felt we should still have a charter. This will be developed as plans unfold (schedule TBD).

There was consensus that the committee should be able to invite others to join the committee. Those present voted unanimously to invite Peter Patel-Schneider to join the committee.

DAML+OIL

• DAML+OIL will primarily consist of the DAML-OIL proposal as modified by committee discussion.
• Synonyms for RDF/RDFS Property and Class and so forth will appear in the DAML+OIL namespace, but "best practice" may dictate to refer to the original namespaces. These synonyms may be deprecated as XML Namespace mechanisms evolve.
• Both Frank's presentation syntax (link TBD) and Dan's n4 presentation syntax (link TBD) will be included as examples, but neither will be made official.
• Updated versions of the formal semantics developed by Deb McGuinness and Richard Fikes and Ian Horrocks and Peter Patel-Schneider will be included, but neither will be made official.
• DAML+ONT is not expected to include on-going work with concrete types.

Ian Horrocks will serve as editor for the DAML+OIL release. All committee members will be listed as co-authors. Since roles are evolving slightly, we'll merge the Editors and Members lists on http://www.daml.org/committee/.

DAML+OIL is expected to be the last major release until we package a contribution for the W3C Working Group.

Schedule

Links