Joint Committee Minutes 20 March 2001

This page summarizes the telecon for the Joint US/EU Committee on Agent Markup Languages held from 1300 to 1400 PST on 20 March 2001. These minutes were prepared by the chairman, and were approved during the 27 March telecon.

Participants

Tim Berners-Lee
Mike Dean
Frank van Harmelen
Pat Hayes (joined late)
Jim Hendler
Ian Horrocks
Deb McGuinness
Peter Patel-Schneider
Lynn Andrea Stein

Announcements

Robin Patrick Decker was born Saturday, March 17.

OpenCyc will use the DAML+OIL language revision.

The URI in Mike's message was wrong; he'll send out a correction.

Last Week's Minutes

The minutes from March 13 were approved by those present.

DAML+OIL (March 2001)

Frank asked if somewhat else could update the walkthru and reference documents. Peter volunteered to make updates tonight, and identify any remaining holes. Lynn and Pat volunteered to work on any subsequently required updated.

The examples have already been extended to include more data types.

N3 and cwm

The discussion centered on Tim's work with N3 and cwm. Tim provided an introduction and then various people asked questions. Some key points from Tim's presentation and subsequent discussion:

People don't write XML on whiteboards. N3 provides an English-like subject verb object sentences ending with a period.
Tim wrote the spec; Dan wrote the parser.
Contexts (scopes) extend the RDF model; triples become quads.
RDF parseType="Quote" is the equivalent of curly bracket. It has no direct mapping back to standard RDF (unlike daml:Collection).
names associated with contexts are just for internal use, e.g. you can say
rule={...}
and then refer to multiple times. N3 may in the future allow an identifier to be associated with contexts.
Converting DAML+OIL to N3 never needs curly braces (contexts).
There is a need to keep track of which identifiers are generated/anonymous throughout processing. See XXX.
Lots of discussion about existential and universal quantifiers.
Tim plans to add "level-breaking operators" (e.g. URI parsing) and arithmetic.
cwm (from Welsh) is pronounced like kume if someone kicked you in the shins at the same time.

Links

IRC
last week's minutes
Joint Committee home page

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