Joint Committee Minutes 6 February 2001

This page summarizes the telecon for the Joint US/EU Committee on Agent Markup Languages held from 1300 to 1400 PST on 6 February 2001. These minutes were prepared by the chairman, and were approved during the 27 February telecon.

Participants

Announcements

There will be no telecon next week (February 13) due to the DAML PI meeting in DC.

A dial-in number will be provided for DAML PI Meeting Language breakout session from 10-noon EST on Wednesday, February 14. Use the same phone numbers and access procedures you use for the Joint Committee telecon.

Last Week's Minutes

The minutes from January 30 were approved by those present.

Concrete Types

Dan discussed his proposal. Frank had suggested a possible middle-ground solution; Ian and Peter had some in-progress updates to their proposal along these lines. A straw poll indicated general agreement with this approach.

There was discussion about whether we should refer to external XML Schema definitions of types, or define a translation of facets, etc. and import that information into DAML. In addition to being able to reason about the types themselves, a lot of the issues relate to conjectures about future availability of XML Schema parsing tools, GUI widgets, etc. There continued to be discussion about equivalence of values and how much one could infer from instances in the absence of further type information.

There was general agreement that it would be a worthwhile first step to adopt use of the URIs of the XML Schema primitive data types (string, boolean, float, double, decimal, uriReference, etc.) and derived built-in types (integer, nonNegativeInteger, positiveInteger, date, etc.) and to defer use of user-defined XML Schema types to a future language release (when we have more feedback, use cases, and tool support).

There was general agreement that the terms "abstract type" and "concrete type" are confusing. Built-in vs. user-defined were suggested as alternatives.

DAML PI Meeting

Mike reiterated the current plans, basically unchanged since last week but with speakers confirmed. RESOLVED: Any W3C presentation on their Semantic Web Activity will be outside the DAML Language heading.

Session chairs for the breakout sessions have not yet been identified.

RESOLVED: There will be no formal Joint Committee meeting (with votes, minutes, etc.), but lots of chance for discussion and consensus building. The Language breakout session, in particular, is an opportunity for us to get feedback from our largest current community of users (about 110 ontologies and 250K statements have been generated to date using the several releases of the DAML language). A telecon number will be published for remote participation in the Language breakout session.

Other

ACTION (Mike Dean): Increase the number of clients allowed to connect to irc.daml.org beyond the current limit of 10.

Links

IRC
Kelly Barber's raw notes
last week's minutes

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