DAML-S Release Status

The current "pre-release" version 0.9 of DAML-S is an incomplete draft version, intended for review and comment from within the DAML, Semantic Web, Web services, and other relevant communities.

What's New or Changed in This Release

This release (0.9 Beta) was announced May 1, 2003. Although we try to avoid making substantive changes to an announced release, occasionally we do provide minor clarifications or corrections to released material. If any such changes are made (that is, changes made after the release announcement), they will be informally summarized here.

Changes for Version 0.9 (from 0.9 Beta)

BravoAirGrounding.wsdl: Added a missing angle bracket.
BravoAirGrounding.wsdl: Inserted several missing namespace uses.
BravoAirGrounding.wsdl: Removed incorrect pound signs with namespace uses.
CongoGrounding.wsdl: Namespace corrections (similar to those for Bravo Air).
CongoProcess.daml/owl: Corrected domain of property nameBookInCatalogue.

Changes for Version 0.9 Beta

This list summarizes changes since the release announcement of Version 0.7. Some of these changes were already introduced prior to the release of Version 0.9, as incremental updates to Version 0.7. This list is a summary; that is, it does not specify all changes.

Notes: There was no Version 0.8 (that number was skipped).

Conditions (appendix) - new material

Explains and illustrates an approach to representing conditional expressions (as used in conditional outputs, preconditions, effects, and conditional control constructs).

Security constructs (appendix) - new material

Explains and illustrates an approach to expressing security capabilities and requirements, in service profiles.

Profile.daml

Various syntax corrections.

Process.daml

Iteration construct refined.

Grounding.daml

Introduction of class WsdlOperationRef which allows one to refer unambiguously to operations in WSDL, using (portType, operation) pairs.
Cardinality restrictions now allow for one-to-many correspondence between an atomic process and WSDL operations.
XSLT transformations can now be used to map between XML Schema type definitions (used in WSDL) and DAML+OIL type definitions. The use of XSLT allows DAML-S enabled Web services to connect to non-DAML+OIL Web services (that is, Web services that don't accept inputs and produce outputs in DAML+OIL).
changed damlsParameter from Datatype to Object property

ProfileHierarchy.daml

changed several incorrect uses of "toValue" to "hasValue" (change due to www-ws message from Vera Zaychik)

CongoProcess.daml

added property putInCartBookISBN (previously the process had an incomplete use of "input") (change due to www-ws message from Monika Solanki)
added "includes" statement for CongoProcessDataFlow.daml

CongoProcessDataFlow.daml

replaced #input with #putInCartBookISBN (due to www-ws messages from Monika Solanki)

CongoGrounding.daml

now using rdf:resource attributes with damlsParameter
now specifying xsd:uriReference rdf:value= where appropriate (Massimo)

BravoAirProcess.daml

several minor syntax corrections

BravoAirGrounding.daml

clean-up of ENTITY definitions
lots of detailed formatting fixes

Changes for Version 0.7

Version 0.7 introduces the Grounding ontology, and includes some refinements to the Profile and Process Model ontologies. In addition, a new example of a Profile-based (yellow-pages style) service taxonomy is presented, and the existing service examples have been made more complete. The new Grounding ontology ties DAML-S in with the Web Services Description Language (WSDL), an emerging, collaborative industry effort that is currently the focus of a W3C working group.

The Profile

Changes to the Profile ontology are summarized here: profileChanges.html.

The Process Model

(Sorry, this summary never got generated.)

The Grounding Ontology

All new material for 0.7.

Deprecated Constructs

Service.daml

isPresentedBy replaced by presentedBy
isDescribedBy replaced by describedBy
isSupportedBy replaced by supportedBy

Profile.daml

See profileChanges.html.

Miscellaneous

Removed minCardinality of 1 from service:presents

What's Missing

This release of DAML-S is missing several notable components that will be added in subsequent releases. In particular

Semantics for DAML-S
Although a formal semantics for DAML-S is not currently included as part of this release, work has been done towards providing both an axiomatic semantics and an operational semantics. The former work is described in
- Narayanan, S. and McIlraith, S., "Simulation, Verification and Automated Composition of Web Services",
and the latter, in
- Anupriya Ankolekar, Frank Huch, Katia Sycara, "Concurrent Execution Semantics for DAML-S with Subtypes",
both of which may be accessed at http://www.daml.org/services/.
Process Control Ontology
In the technical overview section, we identified 4 tasks to be performed by agents. The fourth task, execution monitoring, requires further markup of services. In a subsequent release we will include a process control ontology to provide markup in support of this task.
Conversational Protocol
The current DAML-S definitions are insufficiently clear about how to specify the precise communication patterns that are to take place in carrying out a service (that is, the patterns of messages that are to be exchanged between service participants). However, we believe that the process ontology already provides a basis for specifying these patterns, and it is likely that these specifications will not require many additional new constructs.

Known Limitations

See also DAML-S Design Rationale and Outstanding Issues

Examples

BravoAir process model
The BravoAir process model is somewhat less complete than the Congo process model. It lacks: inputs/outputs for composite processes (but they can be inferred from the sub processes); indication of argument bindings between subprocesses.