Methods in DAML+OIL

Hi everyone.

Our research group (agentcities.adetti-linha4.org) is currently involved in
the AgentCities.RTD project (http://www.agentcities.org/EURTD/) where
ontologies are being developed in DAML+OIL. As far as I could understand
from the daml site, most of the discussions about DAML are made in this
list, so I would like to present you a problem we had and a solution we have
been working on.

While developing the ontologies, which are meant to be used by
FIPA-compliant agents, we felt the need to model, apart from classes and
properties, methods that could be requested. For example, in a Geographic
Information Ontology, there would be a method to compute distances. This
method would apply to a Location and receive another Location as argument.
The output would be a number.

Methods are, however, not considered in DAML+OIL (nor in RDF, ot course)...
To overcome this problem, we made a simple definition in RDF to deal with
these methods. This RDF definition could be considered an extension to
DAML+OIL...

I would like to ask the members of this list to take a look on these
definitions and share any comments with me: if you think methods are
relevant, if this 'extension' is compatible with DAML+OIL (or RDF), or
anything else.

The definition can be found in
http://agentcities.adetti-linha4.org/ontologies/method  . An example
ontology using this definition can be found in
http://agentcities.adetti-linha4.org/ontologies/location-met . The defined
methods are at the end of the document.

Any comment will be highly appreciated. Also, any discussion about methods
in ontologies would be very interesting for the whole AgentCities project, I
think.

Bye and thanks, Luís Mota

Received on Tuesday, 26 November 2002 12:37:30 UTC