1 X talks Tim Finin University of Maryland Baltimore County Joint work with JHU/APL and MIT/Sloan DAML PI Meeting July 18, 2001 ask-all advertisesubscribe tell recommend register

2 Overview 1.Whats been done The ITTALKS DAML application 2.What were working on Adding agent services and ontology mapping for topics 3.What else wed like to do… X talks as a DAML-driven event publishing and notification service

3 ITTALKS ITTALKS is a database driven web site of IT related talks at UMBC and other institutions. The database contains information on –Seminar events –People (speakers, hosts, users,…) –Places (rooms, institutions,…) This database is used to dynamically generate web pages and DAML descriptions for the talks and related information. Notifications are sent to registered users and/or their agents via , SMS, WAP, and/or KQML for talks matching their interests, location and schedule. 1

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5 Registered users create profiles (encoded in DAML) describing their preferences, attributes and interests.

6 After logging in, ITTALKS can filter the talks shown based on my interests, schedule and location.

7 Talks are published in HTML

8 … and in DAML

9 ITTALKS Ontologies Weve defined and use the following ontologies, all at –calendar-ont.daml – calendar and schedule infocalendar-ont.daml –classification.daml – ACM CCS topicsclassification.daml –dist-trust.daml – distributed trust conceptsdist-trust.daml –person-ont.daml – people and their attributesperson-ont.daml –place-ont.daml – talk locationsplace-ont.daml –profile-ont.daml – user modeling infoprofile-ont.daml –talk-ont.daml – talks infotalk-ont.daml –topic-ont.daml – topics and intereststopic-ont.daml

10 ITTALKS Architecture Web server + Java servlets DAML reasoning engine DAML files Agents Databases People RDBMS DB , HTML, SMS, WAP FIPA ACL, KQML, DAML SQL HTTP, KQML, DAML, Prolog MapBlast, CiteSeer, Google, … HTTP HTTP, WebScraping Web Services Apache Tomcat People

11 Advanced Capabilities and features Topic ontologies –Automatic classification of talks and users w.r.t. DAML topic ontologies. –Support for multiple topic ontologies, with manual and automatic mapping between pairs of topic ontologies. Agents –Using DAML as a FIPA compliant ACL –DAML reasoning engine (XSB, YAJXB, RDF API) –Intelligent agents that accept DAML talk notifications and make entries on a users calendar if it matches the users interests, location and schedule. Distributed trust –A DAML distributed trust model for ITTALKS security and authorization. 2

12 What are talks about? Topic hierarchies provide indexing terms –ACM CCS topic hierarchyACM CCS –Open DirectoryOpen Directory Encoded as DAML ontologies These allow users to specify interests as well as browse the database of talks by topic Automatic classification of talks (based on title and abstract) and users (based on his web pages, CV, papers, etc.) Discovery of mapping rules between CCS to OD ontologies using IR techniques

13 Classifying Talks ACM CCS Ontology Training corpus CMU Bow statistical Bow text analysis tools CMU Bow statistical Bow text analysis tools ACM CCS classifier Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the country. Now is the time for topics e.g.: ACM CCS e.g.:5K ACM abstracts Topics Ontology uses

14 Mapping between topic ontologies Topic ontology T1 Training corpus T1 CMU Bow statistical Bow text analysis tools CMU Bow statistical Bow text analysis tools T1 T2 mapper {(t2:bar, 0.8), (t2:qux, 0.7), …} Topic ontology T2 Training corpus T2 T1 T2 t1:foo

15 Topic Ontology Mapper

16 ITTALKS Agent ITTALKS offers a web interface for its human users and can send notifications to humans via , WAP and SMS. We are also developing an agent API so that software agents can interact with ITTALKS. Currently, the ITTALKS agent can send notifications to agents via KQML using DAML as the content language. –We will support richer, mixed initiative dialogs between ITTALKS and agents in the future

17 ITTALKS agent Travel agent Calendar agent User agent DAML reasoning engine Broker Agent Agent Name Server users daml profile mapquest users calendar app e.g. MS Outlook ITTALKS app DAML reasoner Common agent infrastructure KQML API Communication protocol ITAALKS and agents current working prototype

18 Our Calendar Solution MS Outlook Person WEB Wireless Calendar agent

19 X talks.org/ ITTALKS is already a useful DAML application with real users. With additional funding we can –Generalize to X talks, a domain independent version of ITTALKS, configured and customized by a set of DAML ontologies. –X talks will be genuinely useful application capable of supporting 1000s of real users. –Include a generic personal agent that advanced users can adapt and experiment with. – will be a site of meta-information on all known X talk-based sites. 3

20 Just add water… (1)Unpack X talks and place in a medium sized Linux box (2)Sift the DAML config file (3)Stir in one DAML topic ontology (4)Optionally mix in additional DAML event ontology subclasses to taste (5)Optionally top with DAML distributed trust policy information (6)Sprinkle with custom HTML templates, GIFs, and CSS files as desired

21 And X talks becomes… bioTalks or lingTalks or historyTalks or yogaLectures or pentagonSeminars or bostonRaves or mitLcsEvents or …

22 Benefits X talks has the potential to be a widely used application, helping to make DAML and the semantic web more visible, and demonstrating its utility as an ontology language, an intelligent config language, an ACL, … Widespread use of X talks will make lots of DAML available on the web. X talks will provide a good DAML application with which people can experiment and extend. Having a running collection of independent X talks sites will enable interesting research in distributed systems.

23 Whats needed? Re-engineering of ITTALKS to be more DAML driven Tools to help configure X talks –Create/edit/extend topic ontologies –Create/edit the DAML config file –Select the appropriate event classes and/or extend the event ontology –Define the roles and key individuals needed for the distributed trust model Polish code and documentation for open source distribution at

24 ITTALKS is a useful, fairly sophisticated web application that used DAML in an integral way We can generalize this to X talks, an application to manage announcements of talks and other, similar kinds of events in any subject area. This can be simplified and packaged to make it easy to install and maintain. A release, perhaps open source, could lead to wide spread use and subsequent use of and experimentation with DAML. X talks

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