So Long and thanks for all the fish

All-
  As of Monday, the 31st of May, our working group will officially 
come to an end.  We have achieved all that we were chartered to do, 
and I believe our work is being quite well appreciated.  Mail on 
various lists shows use of OWL is increasing, and many people at the 
recent WWW conference, from companies as well as universities, talked 
to me about their use of OWL (In fact, I was even given permission by 
some at Microsoft Research Laboratories to say that there are people 
in their Labs exploring the use of OWL).  While we have much 
education and outreach to still to do, it is clear that we 
accomplished a lot for a first working group in a language, and I 
hope we will get an eventual chance to extend OWL in the future based 
on use over the next couple of years.
  Work on the Semantic Web will of course continue at WWW.  Guus' 
Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment WG is going well, and the 
Distributed Access WG is helping to provide infrastructure that will 
help in the extension of Semantic Web applications, and thus the 
greater use of RDF and OWL.  Those of you looking for a way to spend 
your idle telecon hours are encouraged to explore these groups.  In 
addition, W3C has expressed interest in exploring rules and other 
extensions to semantics, so keep your eye out for announcements about 
upcoming activites
  As chairs, we want to thank all of you, and especially the editors 
of the documents, for all the hard work you put into making this 
working group a success.   It's been a great group, and we will look 
forward to interacting with all of you more in the future.
   So, in the word's of the late Douglas Adams, "So long, and thanks 
for all the fish"
  Jim and Guus.













[1] 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0671745530/104-3322432-6404769?v=glance
-- 
Professor James Hendler			  http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler 
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	  240-277-3388 (Cell)