DAML: MIT Program Review (2000-2004)
1 December 2004
http://www.w3.org/2004/Talks/1201-daml-mit/
$Revision: 1.78 $
DIG
Decentralized Information Group
- Research group at MIT-CSAIL
- Led by Tim Berners-Lee
- overlaps W3C Sem Web Advanced Development (SWAD)
Staff
- Dan Connolly (OWL, cwm, DAWG)
- Danny Weitzner (Tech&Society)
- Eric Miller (Activity Lead)
- Eric Prud'hommeaux (DAWG, algae, Annotea)
- Ralph Swick (Best Practices, Zakim, Annotea)
- Sandro Hawke (Ontaria, LX, OWL, rules)
- Tim Berners-Lee (PI)(cwm, n3)
- (Students)
Affiliated Researchers (for DAML)
- David Karger (Haystack)
- Lynn Andrea Stein (DAML+OIL)
Decentralized Information Systems
- No central bottlenecks (scalable)
- No central point of failure (reliable)
- No central control (social)
- require standards
- Semantic Web Architecture
Tactics
- Stay grounded with needed (real) applications
- Small steps from known solutions (the Web)
- Rough consensus & running code (IETF credo)
- Open source (release early, release often)
- Strive for simplicity
- Trust the market will follow
Get the Semantic Web Rolling
- Real-World Applications
(Annotea, Haystack, Ontaria, Meeting Support)
- Application Platform
(cwm, N3, delta, algae, LX, semwalker)
- Transition to Standards
(JC, RDF Core, OWL, Semantic Web Activity)
Applications
- Provide Use cases
- Close to home
- Demonstrable
Annotea
Post-it notes on web pages
- Demonstrator using sharable RDF for collaboration
- Uses algae for server platform
- Prototypes RDF protocol
- AKA: Shared bookmarks
- Requires browser modifications (alas)
Haystack
Personalized Information Management
- email, news, documents, all in your RDF store
- powerful ui design to make it all navigable
- needs RDF Query, could use rules [?]
- might be the Semantic Web Browser
Ontaria
Ontology Discovery Service
- Help people find and examine ontologies
- Decentralized: all data comes from RDF on the web
- Show provenance and proofs (find the bad data)
- Linked to W3C Ontology Hosting service
- (Semantic Web Browser?)
- 0.8 released 10 weeks ago; ~4k hits/day; 4841 IP Addrs
W3C Document Workflow
Automate W3C Document Production
- Formalization of W3C process
- TR page automation
Calendar Coordination
- iCal and RDF conversion tools
- calendar diff/sync
- travel demos
- bank-statement on calendar
Meeting Support
Semantic Record-Keeping and Tracking
- agenda & minutes ontologies
- action item tracking
- [irc] conversation recording
- audio teleconference bridge tie-in (Zakim)
Application Areas (Summary)
- W3C Core Business:
document production, meeting support
- Web Users: Annotea
- Information Users: Haystack
- RDF and OWL Users: Ontaria
Application Platform
- open source
- deeply RDF
- mostly rule-based
- mostly perl, python, prolog
- feeding standards work
cwm
general-purpose tools for manipulating semantic web data
- On-ramp for new sem web hackers
- Prototype N3 langauge
- Built-in functions as RDF properties
- Fairly well known, 1.0 release recently
n3
- An easier RDF syntax (has "Turtle" subset)
- N3-full adds nested graphs, variables
- Result: covers rules and query needs with single syntax
- Many implementations other than cwm
- Wide and widening use in RDF community
- Grammar described in RDF
Semantic Web Logic Language
"SWeLL"
The Semantic Web concept is to do for data what HTML did for
textual information systems: to provide sufficient flexibility to be
able to represent all databases, and logic rules to link them together
to great added value. -- original proposal
- (log:includes, log:semantics, etc)
- A vocabulary and syntax for adding rules to RDF
- Horn-equivalent, plus Semantic Web builtins
- Part of N3 syntax and expressable as an RDF vocabulary
- Implemented by cwm
reification and proof
ontologies, processed by cwm
- flatten n3's formula literals into RDF
- trace cwm rules firing
- verify transmitted proofs (rule-traces)
local closed world
- log:definitiveDocument
- log:notIncludes
delta/sigma
ontology, processed by cwm
- format for knowledge differences
- not just RDF-graph-diff, uses owl:fp/ifp
- useful for calendar, RDF testing, update protocol
crypto
- crypto:md5
- crypto:sign
- Used to construct delegated trust demo
LX (2002)
Logic Exchange Ontology
- Straightforward ontology of FOL syntax
- Usability (implies truth) predicate, on RDF
- Tools for syntax conversion (to/from Otter, lbase, n3)
- Axiomatization tested with Otter
algae
- query language / system
- persistent triple store
- SQL database access
- RDF access to other system data (filesystem, finger protocol)
- oldest surviving RDF system?
- backs w3.org ACL system, annotea
XML Integration / Legacy Data
Redeeming the user's investment in XML
- Blindfold: EBNF with annotations, based on btyacc (read n3, WSDL)
- GRDDL: XSLT output RDF/XML
- Ontology-Driven-XML Parsing: letting nice XML be read as RDF (stripe-skipping)
semwalker
Server-side RDF browser with integrated Search
- the code behind Ontaria
- full-featured real-time web harvester
- class-specific view of reasources
- all driven by rules, potentially read from web
- fast 2-level RDF cache for millions of triples
- implemented in SWI Prolog
Pre-Standards
- n3-turtle
- n3-full/LX/SWeLL [cf SWRL, DRS, RuleML, SWRL-FOL, SPARQL/Construct, CL]
- delta ontology [cf Atom, Pub/Sub, DiffFacts]
- proof ontology [cf KSL's PDL]
- local closed world ontology
Transition to Real Standards
- MIT as W3C Host: Unique Position
- W3C is the member organizations, not the Team
- (Team is ~70 people from hosts, members)
- Consensus can't be forced
- ...but it can be supported (examples follow)
Acknowledged Submissions
pre-standardization positioning
- DAML+OIL (now OWL)
- SWRL
- OWL-S
W3C Recommendations
- RDF Core
- WG participation
- Many issues raised, clarified
- prototyping in cwm, algae, ...
- OWL
- Team Contact
- Surnia (OWL Full Reasoner), demonstrating OWL-Full Interop
- OWL Test Results page, making sense of ~300 tests x 10 systems
Current Working Groups
- Data Access Working Group (DAWG)
- Best Practices and Deployment Working Group
Other Consensus Building
- Mailing list participation
- Demonstrating interoperability
- Running wiki (esw.w3.org)
Conclusions
Transition/Handoff
- Influenced RDF Core, OWL, ~SWRL
- Built cwm, ontaria, algae, annotea, etc; (dev.w3.org)
- Papers? SciAm, Haystack, mostly invited talks
- No commercial or DoD pilot/product work
- Changed World? We all helped get the Semantic Web going
Conclusions
(Ongoing Work/Issues)
- Logic on the Web (beyond OWL)
- cwm
- Ontaria (semwalker)
- Policy-Aware Web (trust)
STOP! You're Done! Go Back.
various reports to daml
http://www.daml.org/2001/04/iow/mit/
http://www.daml.org/2003/01/iow/mit/
http://www.darpa.mil/ito/psum2001/K535-0.html
http://www.w3.org/2000/01/sw/DevelopmentProposal
http://www.w3.org/2002/02/iow2
http://www.w3.org/2002/03/DARPA-SOW
http://www.w3.org/2002/11/29-sw-qr
http://www.w3.org/2002/11/DAML-IOW
http://www.w3.org/2003/09/15-damlwp/darpa-wp.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Team/sw-team/2004Apr/att-0048/DAMLQ1report.html
http://www.w3.org/2004/07/DAMLQ2report
http://www.w3.org/2004/10/DAMLQ3report