1st public release - DAML-ONT

As program manager of the "DARPA Agent Markup Language" initiative, I 
am pleased to announce the first release of a significant piece of 
the DAML language.  DAML is an effort to help bring the "semantic 
web" into being, focusing on the eventual creation of a web logic 
language. It represents joint work between DoD, industry and academia 
in both the US and the European Community and we hope it will lead to 
the eventual web standard in this area.

This first release is a draft language for the "ontology" core of the 
language (roughly corresponding to a frame-based or description logic 
starting place) - this allows the definition of classes and 
subclasses, their properties, and a set of restrictions thereon.  The 
language does not yet include any specification of explicit inference 
rules, which we hope will follow.

We believe this ontology core will be a useful starting place for 
extending the language, and for experiments in a web-based semantic 
language that is accessible to a wide audience.

The language is based on RDF (actually RDF Schema) and extends it to 
include new concepts.

A group of researchers from MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science had 
primary responsibility for developing this language core.  This was 
then extended by a number of people including representives from the 
OIL effort, the SHOE project, the KIF work, and DAML contractors. 
Some of the primary contributors are listed below.

Details of the language release and pointers to the above named 
projects (and others) can be found at http://www.daml.org

  - Jim Hendler
  DAML Program Manager

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Preliminary release - DAML-ONT 0.5

The documents in this collection reflect the contributions of a large 
number of people and projects.

Lynn Andrea Stein, Dan Connolly, editors.

Key contributors include:

Tim Berners-Lee
Frank van Harmelen
Ian Horrocks
Dan Brickley
Mike Dean
Stefan Decker
Richard Fikes
Pat Hayes
Jeff Heflin
Drew McDermott
Deborah McGuinness
Ralph R. Swick

Dr. James Hendler		jhendler@darpa.mil
Chief Scientist, DARPA/ISO	703-696-2238 (phone)
3701 N. Fairfax Dr.		703-696-2201 (Fax)
Arlington, VA 22203		http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hendler

Received on Tuesday, 10 October 2000 12:29:06 UTC