Re: GUIDE: New version.

I always worry when we have a history section, because we run the 
risk of leaving things out.  Jeff Heflin would be right to complain 
as SHOE predates both DAML and OIL (and, in fact, RDF) and Dieter and 
his crew might want to see Ontobroker mentioned, as it also predates 
OWL.  I'd suggest amending Peter's history to add these important 
forbears (SHOE was the first ontology language on the web and 
ontobroker was the first to use DL concepts in the web context that I 
know of.

I'd suggest we either drop the history section, or use what Peter 
sent ammended as below to make the time line clear and to acknolwedge 
the earlier work.  In addition, we might want to mention the MCF note 
that was submitted to the W3C and was a forbear to RDF.
  -Jim H.



>
>Suggested new text:
>
>
><p>
><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax">The Resource Description
>Framework (RDF)</a> was the first language specified by the W3C for
>representing semantic information about arbitrary resources.
><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/CR-rdf-schema">RDF Schema (RDFS)</a>
>is a W3C candidate recommendation for an extension to RDF to describe RDF
>vocabularies.
>RDFS can be used to create ontologies, but it is purposefully very
>lightweight so little can be said about the consituents of ontologies in
>RDFS.
>Further, RDF and RDFS had only an informal specification of the meaning of
>their constructs.
></p>
>
><p>
>Like OWL, RDFS includes classes and properties, as well as
>range and domain constraints on properties.  It provides
>inheritance hierarchies for both classes and properties.  Upon its
>release users began requesting additional features, including data
>types, enumerations and the ability to define properties more
>rigorously.
></p>


<p> Other efforts in the research community were already examining 
exactly these sorts of features.  As early as 1995, the
<a href="http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/plus/SHOE">
Simple HTML Ontology Extensions <SHOE> project </a> had been 
exploring the adding of more ontological content to web documents, 
and soon after the <a 
href="http://ontobroker.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/index_ob.html">
Ontobroker project </a> started, with a focus on annotating sets of 
web pages related to Knowledge Acquisition.  These projects provided 
a testbed for exploring ideas including the use of URIs for embedding 
ontologies on the web, mechanisms for linking and extending 
ontologies, the first explorations of rule-languages for the web, and 
the first attempts at formalizing knowledge representation on the 
web.  SHOE and Ontobroker each resulted in a corpus of marked-up web 
pages, and in papers describing the dos (and don'ts) of using 
ontologies on the web.


><p>
Based on the earlier Ontobroker work, in 1999

  <words deleted>

>a group of European researchers, funded through the
><a href="http://www.ontoknowledge.org/">On-To-Knowledge project</a> of the
>E.U., defined an ontology language called 
><a href="http://www.ontoknowledge.org/oil/index.shtml">OIL
>(Ontology Inference Layer)</a>.
>OIL was based on ideas from
><a href="http://dl.kr.org">description logics</a>,
>frames,
>and the W3C XML and RDF (including RDFS) languages.
>OIL was much more powerful than RDFS, but tried to retain some
>compatability with RDF and RDFS.
>The basic syntax for OIL was a frame-like syntax, but there was also an
>RDFS syntax for OIL.
>OIL was equipped with a full model-theoretic semantics, providing a formal
>meaning for the language.
></p>
>



><p>
At about the same time that OIL was being developed, in an attempt to 
extend the expressive power of RDFS,

>a group of U.S. researchers, funded through the
><a href="http://www.daml.org/">DAML (DARPA Agent Markup
>Language) program</a> initiated by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects
>Agency, defined a language called
><a href="http://www.daml.org/2000/10/daml-ont.html">DAML-ONT</a>. 
>This language was also an ontology language, somewhat similar to OIL, but
>based much more directly on RDFS. 
>The basic syntax for DAML-ONT was the RDF syntax.
>A <a href="http://www.daml.org/2000/10/DAML-Ont-kif-axioms-001107.html">
>partial axiomatization</a> in KIF was provided form DAML-ONT.
></p>
>
><p>
>Instead of continuing with separate ontology languages for the Semantic
>Web, a group of researchers, including many of the main participants in
>both the OIL and DAML-ONT efforts, got together in the
><a href="http://www.daml.org/committee/">Joint US/EU ad hoc Agent Markup
>Language Committee</a> to create a new web ontology language.
>This language
><a href="http://www.daml.org/2001/03/daml+oil-index.html">DAML+OIL</a>
>builds on both OIL and DAML-ONT, and was
><a 
>href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2001Dec/0144.html">submitted</a>
>to the W3C as a proposed
>basis for OWL and was subsequently selected as the starting point for OWL.
></p>


-- 
Professor James Hendler				  hendler@cs.umd.edu
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  240-731-3822 (Cell)
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler

Received on Tuesday, 24 September 2002 16:47:19 UTC