ANNOUNCE: W3C Web Ontology (WebOnt) Working Group

With thanks to all the folks that provided careful review
and feedback on the proposed charter, especially the
folks that offered to particpate, I'm happy to announce
that the W3C Web Ontology Working group has been
added to the W3C Semantic Web Activity...

[[[
This Working Group, part of the Semantic Web Activity, will focus on the
development of a language to extend the semantic reach of current XML
and RDF meta-data efforts. In particular, in a recent talk on the
Semantic
Web, Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the W3C, outlined the necessary layers
for developing applications that depend on an understanding of logical
content, not just human-readable presentation. This working group will
focus
on building the ontological layer and the formal underpinnings thereof.

Such language layers are crucial to the emerging Semantic Web, as they
allow the explicit representation of term vocabularies and the
relationships
between entities in these vocabularies. In this way, they go beyond XML,
RDF and RDF-S in allowing greater machine readable content on the web.
A further necessity is for such languages to be based on a clear
semantics
(denotational and/or axiomatic) to allow tool developers and language
designers to unambiguously specify the expected meaning of the semantic
content when rendered in the Web Ontology syntax.

Specifically, the Web Ontology Working Group is chartered to design the
following component:

     A Web ontology language, that builds on current Web languages that
     allow the specification of classes and subclasses, properties and
     subproperties (such as RDFS), but which extends these constructs to
     allow more complex relationships between entities including: means
to
     limit the properties of classes with respect to number and type,
means
     to infer that items with various properties are members of a
particular
     class, a well-defined model of property inheritance, and similar
     semantic extensions to the base languages. 

     The March 2001 DAML+OIL specification, discussed in some detail in
     section 1.1 below serves as an example of an ontology language - a
     comparison of DAML+OIL to XML, XML-schema, and RDF-Schema is
     available.

Furthermore, the following general requirements must be met by the work
produced by this Working Group:

     The products of the WebONT group should not presuppose any
     particular approach to either ontology design or ontology use. In
     addition, the language must support the development and linking of
     ontologies together, in a web-like manner. 
     The products of this working group must be supported by a formal
     semantics allowing language designers, tool builders, and other
     "experts" to be able to precisely understand the meaning and
"legal"
     inferences for expressions in the language. 
     The language will use the XML syntax and datatypes wherever
     possible, and will be designed for maximum compatibility with XML
and
     RDF language conventions. 

The Working Group shall start by evaluating the technical solutions
proposed
in the DAML+OIL draft. If in this process the Working Group finds
solutions
that are agreed to be improvements over solutions suggested by
DAML+OIL, those improved solutions should be used.

The Working Group will be chaired by Jim Hendler (Univ of Maryland) .

The remainder of this section describes the requirements and
deliverables in
more detail.
]]]

--        W3C Web Ontology Working Group Charter
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/WebOnt/charter
Tue, 14 Aug 2001 00:03:48 GMT


Membership so far includes...

[[[
     Einar Breen, Adaptive Media ASA 
     Stephen Buswell, Stilo Technology 
     Jeremy Carroll, Hewlett Packard Company 
     Dan Connolly, W3C, Team contact 
     Jonathan Dale, Fujitsu Limited 
     Jos De Roo, Agfa-Gevaert N. V. 
     D.C. DeRoure, University of Southampton 
     Nicholas Gibbins, University of Southampton 
     James Hendler, Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab at
     the University of Maryland (chair) 
     Ian Horrocks, Network Inference 
     Oisen Hurley, Iona Technologies, Inc. 
     Mario Jeckle, Daimler Chrysler Research and Technology 
     Ruediger Klein, Daimler Chrysler Research and Technology 
     Michael Kohlhase, German Research Center for Artificial
Intelligence
     (DFKI) Gmbh 
     Natasha Kravtsova, Philips Electronic N.V. 
     Ora Lassila, Nokia 
     Libby Miller, University of Bristol 
     Peter Patel-Schneider, Lucent Technologies (intro) 
     Martin Pike, Stilo Technology 
     Guus Schreiber, Ibrow 
     Michael Sintek, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence
     (DFKI) Gmbh 
     michael smith, Electronic Data System (EDS) 
     Ned Smith, Intel Corporation 
     Warner ten Kate, Philips Electronic N.V. 
     Herman ter Horst, Philips Electronic N.V. 
     Lynne R. Thompson, Unisys Corporation 
     David Trastour, Hewlett Packard Company 
     Frank van Harmelen, Ibrow 
     Laxman Venigalla, Nisus, Inc. 
     ...@@ a few other nominations are in-progress, as well as a number
     of invited expert applications 
]]]

--        W3C Web Ontology (WebOnt) Working Group
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/WebOnt/#Membership
Wed, 31 Oct 2001 22:16:04 GMT

Jim H. and I are arranging the first teleconference... sometime
in the next 3 weeks or so, certainly after the upcoming
W3C Advisory Committee meeting.

I trust everybody will give their careful attention to working
drafts etc. produced by the WG... as per usual W3C process,
they're due at least every 3 months.

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Thursday, 1 November 2001 11:10:35 UTC