From: John Flynn ([email protected])
Date: 11/28/01
HotDAML Newsletter Keeping you up to speed on happenings in the world of DAML http://www.daml.org <http://www.daml.org/> _____ Wednesday, November 28, 2001 - Issue 5 _____ New Stories: W3C announces Web Ontology Working Group based on DAML+OIL The World Wide Web Consortium, the body that is responsible for many current web languages such as XML and RDF, has decided to start a Working Group to develop a recommendation for a web ontology language. The charter of this group cites DAML+OIL as a starting point for this language reading "The March 2001 DAML+OIL specification, discussed in some detail below, serves as an example of an ontology language - a comparison of DAML+OIL to XML, XML-schema, and RDF-Schema is available...The Working Group shall start by evaluating the technical solutions proposed in the DAML+OIL draft. " Jim Hendler, the former Program Manager for the DAML program, will chair the new working group. See http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/WebOnt for more information. RETSINA Semantic Web Calendar Agent V1.06a announced The Semantic Web Calendar Agent developed by CMU parses and presents Semantic Web schedule and event information (marked up in RDF and DAML), provides integration with MS Outlook 2000, and interoperates with other agent systems. Schedules (such as class or conference schedules) that are marked up using the Hybrid RDF Calendar Ontology and Dublin Core Ontology can be browsed and imported directly into Outlook�s calendar, and reminders can be scheduled to notify users and other agents of imminent meetings (e.g., reminders can be sent by the Calendar Agent to cell phones or other devices). A semantic web browser offering context sensitive services, such as abstracting information to email a meeting attendee or to browsing their contact details, is included. Using KQML messages, the agent can be invoked remotely to import and interactively explore the schedule, location and contact information harvested as RDF and DAML markup. An Alpha release of the Calendar Agent is available for Windows platforms with Outlook 2000, at http://www.daml.ri.cmu.edu/Cal <http://www.daml.ri.cmu.edu/Cal> . In addition, several sample schedules are available at this url. An editor that supports DAML schedule markup will be available shortly. New version of DAML-S scheduled for release A new version, version 0.6, of DAML-S (DAML for Services) is scheduled for release on December 5, 2001. Version 0.6 will include a number of refinements to the Service Profile and Process Model. The Service Profile is used to concisely represent the service, in terms of capabilities, service provider information, and operational parameters (e.g. cost-of-use, quality-of-service parameters, etc), and advertise the service with Web Service Registries. Improvements over DAML-S 0.5 include: clarification and simplification of capability description parameters (i.e. inputs, outputs, preconditions and effects), and a tighter integration with the process model, as well as refinements necessary to facilitate automatic service discovery through Matchmaking. The Process Model now includes three subclasses of Process: AtomicProcess, SimpleProcess, and CompositeProcess, and some new properties that characterize the relationships between processes of these different types. Among the other significant changes, the model allows for conditions on outputs and effects of all processes, and for computed inputs, outputs, effects, and preconditions associated with composite processes. It also includes a simplification of the representation of composite processes that facilitate composite process encoding and manipulation. The services ontology includes three major subdivisions, those dealing with profiles, process models, and groundings. Looking further ahead, version 1.0 will be released when work on groundings has been completed. This promises to tie DAML-S in with emerging industry service description languages such as WSDL. DAML-S release 0.6 will be made available at http://www.daml.org/services/. Agentscities to use DAML+OIL The European Union 5th Framework project Agentcities.RTD will be adopting DAML+OIL as its initial ontology representation and expects to recommend it for use in the wider Agentcities network. There are 14 partners in the Agentcities.RTD project, around 50 planning to participate in a related network project (Agentcities.NET), and a significant number of other Agentcities activities around the world are currently active or planned. For more information see: http://www.agentcities.org <http://www.agentcities.org/> /EURTD/ Agent Semantic Communication Service available An alpha version of the Agent Semantic Communication Service (ASCS) is now available at <http://plucky.teknowledge.com/daml/damlquery.jsp>. The system builds on the DAML Crawler to implement a search system that can search all the DAML content that exists. The system all implements simple superclass and subclass reasoning to narrow or broaden searches. Items slated for near term release include query ordering heuristics to improve speed, and GUI improvements. Longer term items that build on this base include more sophisticated use of ontology translation and reasoning. Semantic Web for Military Users The second Semantic Web for Military Users conference took place on 13 �14 November, 2001. Potential military users of DAML technology met to discuss how the use of DAML could enhance specific military projects. The conference was hosted by Dr. David Aha at the Naval Research Laboratory. Information on the first and second Semantic Web for Military Users conferences can be found at http://www.daml.org/meetings/. DAML at conferences Ken Baclawski presented "Extending UML to Support Ontology Engineering for the Semantic Web" at the Fourth International Conference on UML (UML 2001) held in Toronto on October 1-5 (see http://www.cs.toronto.edu/uml2001/). The paper and presentation can be found at http://vis.home.mindspring.com/ The First International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP 2001) was held in Victoria, B.C., Canada on October 21-23 (http://sern.ucalgary.ca/ksi/K-CAP/K-CAP2001/ ). DAML+OIL related research was well represented at the main conference as well as the K-CAP 2001 Workshop on Knowledge Markup and Semantic Annotation. See http://semannot2001.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/ Archive of <http://www.daml.org/newsletters/> HotDAML <http://www.daml.org/newsletters/> Newsletters <http://www.daml.org/newsletters/> Subscription, Questions, Comments, Story Tips <http://www.daml.org/newsletters/>
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