Joint Committee Minutes 19 June 2001

This page summarizes the telecon for the Joint US/EU Committee on Agent Markup Languages held from 1300 to 1400 PDT on 19 June 2001. These minutes were prepared by the chairman, and were approved during the 26 June telecon.

Participants

Announcements

RuleML 0.8 has been released. It's more oriented toward RDF than RuleML 0.7, which focused on just XML.

Pat Hayes and Sergey Melnik have joined the W3C RDF Core Working Group as invited experts.

Tony Tether has started as the new DARPA Director A brief biography is available here.

Last Week's Minutes

We'll review and approve the minutes next week.

WonderWeb

Ian described the WonderWeb effort, which was just awarded by the EU (Ian, Frank, and Stefan Decker are among the funded participants). It's a 30 month effort, likely to start in the autumn. It covers many aspects of the Semantic Web and includes collaboration with DAML and W3C.

OntoWeb

Frank reported on last week's OntoWeb Kickoff Meeting. OntoWeb is an EU-funded "network of excellence" funding travel and workshops (not research and development) among academic and industrial members. DAML+OIL was featured prominently and essentially accepted as the de facto choice for the OntoWeb ontology language. Several issues came up in the Language SIG:
  1. RDF syntax.
    Several people expressed concern over the RDF syntax (one commented that "it looks like machine code"). There's a desire for an alternative human-readable syntax (more readable than N3, which Mike presented in several of his examples).
  2. What is the relationship between Topic Maps and RDF/DAML+OIL?
    Topic Maps are getting quite a bit of press, particularly with their focus on attractive user interfaces. There's already been some discussion between the W3C RDF folks and TopicMap folks. Stefan noted the recent split in the Topic Map community, and that SWWS will include an invited talk on Topic Maps. Topic Maps would make a very good RDF/DAML+OIL application.
  3. Should DAML+OIL preserve more of a frame notion, e.g. explicitly indicating what properties "might be relevant" to a particular class?
    Ian referred people to his recent paper.
  4. DAML-S was regarded as an important development.
    Web Services could be the first showcase for Semantic Web. There are opportunities for US/EU collaboration on Web Services: Sheila McIlraith will attend the next meeting of the European iBrow project.

Face-to-Face Meeting

There was general consensus that it would be beneficial to have another face-to-face meeting. The tentative plan is a late meeting (say 2-8pm, with dinner brought in) on Tuesday, July 17, in Nashua NH immediately prior to the DAML PI meeting. ACTION (Mike): check on logistics and send a message to [email protected].

Upcoming Meetings

Frank and Pat are working on a rules proposal (1 of 2 possible) and plan to have something available for our July 3 telecon.

Frank and Deb volunteered to help Stefan and Peter with their layering proposal.

We'll coordinate language presentations at the DAML PI Meeting as the agenda evolves.

Links

Kelly Barber's raw notes
last week's minutes
Joint Committee home page

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