Reviewing the Design of DAML+OIL: An Ontology Language for the Semantic Web

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 18

Web and Information Extraction

In the current "Syntactic Web," uninterpreted syntactic constructs are given meaning only by private off-line agreements that are inaccessible to computers. In the Semantic Web vision, this is replaced by a web where both data and its semantic definition are accessible and manipulable by computer software. DAML+OIL is an ontology language specifically designed for this use in the Web; it exploits existing Web standards (XML and RDF), adding the familiar ontological primitives of object oriented and frame based systems, and the formal rigor of a very expressive description logic. The definition of DAML+OIL is now over a year old, and the language has been in fairly widespread use. In this paper, we review DAML+OIL’s relation with its key ingredients (XML, RDF, OIL, DAML-ONT, Description Logics), we discuss the design decisions and trade-offs that were the basis for the language definition, and identify a number of implementation challenges posed by the current language. These issues are important for designers of other representation languages for the Semantic Web, be they competitors or successors of DAML+OIL, such as the language currently under definition by W3C.