Master for General Gray's brief

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Agent Markup Languages, XML and the Semantic
Web John Flynn BBN Technologies Jflynn_at_bbn.com
June 14, 2001
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(No Transcript)
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WorldWideWeb
Internet
Semantic Web
XML
2020
2000
1980
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In 30 years e-commerce will have become second
nature. Lifelike, intelligent virtual assistants
will be performing most routine transactions and
simple negotiations electronically on our behalf.
More technological change will have taken place
in that period than during the entire twentieth
century, and the curve will continue to steepen
exponentially into the foreseeable future.
Ray Kurzweil
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What Is An Agent?

• Software module
• Intended to act as a proxy for you in some way
• May be
• Tightly controlled
• Autonomous
• Mobile

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Why Is This Important?

• Humans work sequentially
• Agents work in parallel and 24x7
• Therefore, agents can be a major productivity
  multiplier

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Web Trends

• Web is evolving from a provider of documents and
  images (information retrieval)
• To a provider of services
• Web service discovery -
• Find me an airline service that offers flights to
  Singapore
• Web service execution -
• Buy me Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone at
  
• www.amazon.com
• Web service selection, composition and
  interoperation -
• Make my travel arrangements for my Internet World
  conference trip
• Both retrieval and services lend themselves to
  agent technologies

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Problems

• Average Web searches examine only 25 of
  available information
• Web searches return a lot of unwanted information
• Information content of the Web doubles
  approximately every six months
• Problem continues to worsen as Web grows

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Why Dont We Have Agents Today?

• Information on the World Wide Web is based on
  HTML
• HTML is intended only for the visual presentation
  of information for humans to understand
• The best you can do is some form of word lookup
• There is no syntactic, semantic or logic
  description of the information
• Information is not machine readable

Algol Ship, Star, Computer Language?
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XML

• World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard
• Provides important solution to syntax problem and
  simple semantics and schemas
• ltSSNgt444-23-2656lt/SSNgt
• Now we can describe the meaning of words
• Many applications of XML appearing
• Geographic Markup Language (GML)
• Extensible rights Markup Language (XrML)
• Chemical Markup Language (CML)

Problem Limited semantics and ontology
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DARPA Agent Markup Language

• Builds on top of XML and RDF
• Provides rich ontology representation
• Key starting point for W3C Semantic Web activity
• Future releases will provide logic and rules
  capabilities

Problem Tools to help create DAML ontologies,
markup, and to facilitate access are still
emerging
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EXAMPLES
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DAML Status

• DAML ontology language specification released
• http//www.daml.org provides public Web site with
  DAML information
• 18 top-level research teams are developing DAML
  technology
• Including Tim Berners-Lee (creator of web)
• Dan Connolly (key developer of XML)
• Supported by W3C their new Semantic Web Activity

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Conclusions

• DAML has the potential to revolutionize the way
  we use the Web
• As the Semantic Web infrastructure grows it will
  result in major improvements in human access to
  information
• Agents will act as real functional proxies for
  people and greatly increase their productivity

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Vision The Semantic Web
http//www.daml.org