The web has exploded at an astounding rate. Still it has limitations in its current form. The presentation language (html) that is used to encode today's web pages was only aimed at providing presentation of information and services for human consumption. A real semantic web needs to include information concerning the content of those pages. Early markup languages such as XML and RDF provide mechanisms for encoding simple descriptions of content. The DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) Program attempts to provide an infrastructure for providing markup that is understandable by humans and machines and thus facilitate automation of a semantic web.

Stanford's DAML Language effort is aimed at developing the language that supports the expressive needs of the web. The initial language (released in October, 2000) was developed under the guidance of a DAML committee chaired by Mike Dean with co-editors: Dan Connolly of W3C, Deborah McGuinness of Stanford, and Lynn Stein of W3C, MIT, and Olin. The initial language design is available from here. It was initially titled DAML-ONT representing the ontology language for the DAML program.

The DAML Language has expanded to be more international and development is now overseen by the Joint US/EU ad hoc Agent Markup Language committee. KSL's provides McGuinness as a representative to the committee. Committee membership is available at: http://www.daml.org/committee/. Minutes of the weekly meetings are available at: http://www.daml.org/committee/minutes/.

DAML+OIL evolved from DAML-ONT as a result of work from the the joint committee and in two DAML-OIL meetings. The first DAML-OIL meeting occurred in Aachen, Germany in August, 2000 and resulted in proposals to merge the DAML ontology language with the OIL language. The second DAML-OIL meeting occurred in Amsterdam, Netherlands in September, 2000 and resulted in among other things, a white paper further specifying how DAML and OIL could combine. The current release of the DAML ontology language has been renamed DAML+OIL and is available at: http://www.w3.org/TR/daml+oil-reference.

This release of the language includes an axiomatic semantics specification of DAML+OIL. Since DAML+OIL is built on top of RDFS and RDF, the specification also includes the axiomatic semantics for RDF and RDFS. The semantics were produced by Fikes and McGuinness and are available from: http://www.w3.org/TR/daml+oil-axioms.

The semantic web activity of the world wide web consortium has been formed to further research and development on the semantic web. The Joint Committee helped to initiate the Web Ontology working group within the semantic web activity. McGuinness is the W3C advisory representative for Stanford and a member of the WebOnt committee. DAML+OIL was submitted as the starting point for the WebOnt language work. WebOnt has produced its language, OWL which is very similar to DAML+OIL. A feature synopsis has been written by McGuinness and van Harmelan on OWL and a simpler version of OWL called OWL Lite.

We provided and are maintaining the axiomatic semantics for the DAML ontology language. Click here for a directory listing or here for an abstract of the document with pointers to versions in different formats.

DAML Axiomatic Semantics Newsgroup Discussion

Model Theoretic Semantics Newsgroup Discussion

For further information on this research project, please contact Dr. Deborah L. McGuinness .

Back to KSL's DAML Project Page.