Re: a doubt on basic concepts

Dear Peter,

Peter wrote:
> Dear all, as i read, some basic ideas i would like to enquire. DAML
>  DAML + OIL OIL RDF.
> 
> well,  DAML has two version, (or we say DAML actually is DAML 
> family? )one is DAML-ONT (old) , the other is DAML-OIL(new). 
> correct?
> 
> OIL, a kind of ontology presentation language. and DAML-OIL is its 
> RDF version of syntax serialization., correct?

Close but not quite. Let me tell you a story, of three-letter
abbreviations and oversea friendships.

OIL stands for Ontology Interchange Language, and was developed in
1999/2000, in the context of a European IST project (On-To-Knowledge,
http://www.ontoknowledge.org/) as an attempt to come up with a usable
KR language for knowledge mangagement in such environments as
corporate intranets . It was a mix between Description Logics, Frame
Logics and RDF. OIL already had an RDF syntax. OIL came in three
flavours: OIL Lite (basically RDFS minus reification), OIL Standard
(roughly comparable to OWL DL) and Heavy OIL (roughly OWL Full).

The DAML project (http://www.daml.org/) was a US funded research
project that had some overlapping goals with On-To-Knowledge. DAML
stands for DARPA Agent Markup Language, but confusingly, there is no
actual language that is called DAML.

DAML-ONT was a first attempt at an Agent Markup language based on OIL,
basically it was a rough first draft version that had some primitives
removed, others added, and a different RDF syntax. The joint EU-US
ontology working group (consisting of a.o. members of the DAML project
and On-To-Knowledge) then worked on several revisions of this initial
DAML-ONT proposal, to make it more usable. The result of this was
DAML+OIL. Another language developed in DAML is DAML-S, a Web Service
markup language.

DAML+OIL then became input for the W3C Ontology Working Group, and the
   end result (for now at least) of that is the OWL family of languages.

I hope that my tale entertained and enlightened ;)

Jeen
-- 
Jeen Broekstra                                      Vrije Universiteit
                                Dept. of Mathematics & Computer Science
jbroeks@cs.vu.nl                 de Boelelaan 1081a, 1081 HV Amsterdam
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~jbroeks                           The Netherlands

Received on Tuesday, 19 October 2004 19:31:26 UTC