1. Agent Markup Languages, XML and the Semantic Web John Flynn BBN Technologies Jflynn@bbn.com June 14, 2001

3. 202020001980 * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Cars Airplanes Tanks Movies TV shows Ships * *** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Internet World Wide Web XML Semantic Web

4. 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

5. What Is An Agent? Software module Intended to act as a proxy for you in some way May be: –Tightly controlled –Autonomous –Mobile

6. Why Is This Important? Humans work sequentially Agents work in parallel and 24x7 Therefore, agents can be a major productivity multiplier

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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?

10. XML World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard Provides important solution to syntax problem and simple semantics and schemas: 444-23-2656 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

11. 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

12. EXAMPLES Fred Jones Information About Fred Jones Fred Jones is in the U.S. Air Force. He is a Captain stationed at AFRL. HTML Fred Jones U.S. Air Force AFRL Captain XML Fred Smith http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#http://www.daml.org/2001/03/daml+oil#http://www.dod.mil/personnel#http://www.af.mil/personnel#http://www.rl.af.mil/personnel#http://www.dod.mil/services#AirForcehttp://www.af.mil/personnel#Captainhttp://www.af.mil/stations#AFRL_Rome DAML

13. 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

14. 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

15. Vision: The Semantic Web Buy CarBuy TVFind JobGet InfoAirline Ticket Find Restaurant