Re: Starting from DAML-S

On Thu, 24 Apr 2003, Stefan Decker wrote:

>
> Hi,
>
> during the last F2F meeting Bijan and I, with the help of Sheila,
> tried to understand certain aspects of DAML-S.
> It occurred to us (after a while) that DAML-S has multiple ways to say the
> same thing, which are not necessary in a minimal language
> (and which are quite confusing to me).
>
> Given Austin's comments today, and starting from DAML-S,
> it makes sense to look at the different
> DAML-S constructs and try to minimize DAML-S so that
> we hopefully end up with a minimal set of agreed upon
> primitives necessary to do what DAML-S does.
>
> Best,
> 	Stefan


I agree that it is worthwhile trying to develop a minimal or light version
of DAML-S.  Terry Payne and I have had some discussions towards this end.
Nevertheless, in defense of the existing DAML-S ontology, while there are
one or two constructs that enable one to say the same thing in several
different ways, the constructs themselves are not totally redundant.
Each construct enables the expression of something unique.

I think the issue that was confusing was the power of a DAML-S
"simpleProcess" construct, which can be used to represent an
abstract view of a process.  As such, if it is applied to abstracting
or creating a "view" of the inputs, outputs, preconditions and effects
of an "atomicProcess" or "compositeProcess", it can achieve some of
the same representational effect as the "Profile" ontology.

I think "simpleProcess" is a nice example of how we can make an
abstraction or view of a more complex representation such as
the notion of "compositeProcess" -- something I think we'd like
to achieve in any next version of the language.

Sheila


==================================================================
Sheila McIlraith, PhD                 Phone: 650-723-7932
Senior Research Scientist             Fax:  650-725-5850
Knowledge Systems Lab
Department of Computer Science
Gates Sciences Building, 2A-248       http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/people/sam
Stanford University                   E-mail sam@ksl.stanford.edu
Stanford, CA 94305-9020

Received on Thursday, 24 April 2003 18:40:13 UTC