Transcript UMBC - DAMl

Xtalks
Tim Finin
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University of Maryland Baltimore County
Joint work with JHU/APL and MIT/Sloan
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DAML PI Meeting
July 18, 2001
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Overview
1. What’s been done
The ITTALKS DAML application
2. What we’re working on
Adding agent services and ontology mapping
for topics
3. What else we’d like to do…
Xtalks as a DAML-driven event publishing
and notification service
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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 email, SMS, WAP, and/or KQML for talks matching their
interests, location and schedule.
http://ittalks.org/
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Registered users create profiles
(encoded in DAML) describing their
preferences, attributes and interests.
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Talks are
published
in HTML
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… and in
DAML
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ITTALKS Architecture
Web server +
Java servlets
People
HTTP
Email, HTML,
SMS, WAP
Web Services
MapBlast, CiteSeer,
Google, …
HTTP, WebScraping
Agents
Apache
Tomcat
People
FIPA ACL, KQML,
DAML
SQL
DB
RDBMS
Databases
<daml>
<daml>
<daml>
</daml>
<daml>
</daml>
</daml>
</daml>
DAML
reasoning
engine
DAML files
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2
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 user’s calendar if it matches the
user’s interests, location and schedule.
• Distributed trust
– A DAML distributed trust model for ITTALKS security
and authorization.
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ITAALKS and agents
current working prototype
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1
ITTALKS app
mapquest
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11
ITTALKS
agent
Travel
agent
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user’s daml profile
Communication
protocol
KQML
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2
API
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User
agent
3
DAML
reasoning engine
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13 5
14
7
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4
Broker
Agent
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Agent
Name
Server
Common agent infrastructure
DAML reasoner
Calendar
agent
user’s calendar app
e.g. MS Outlook
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3
http://Xtalks.org/
ITTALKS is already a useful DAML application with real users.
With additional funding we can
– Generalize to Xtalks, a domain independent version of
ITTALKS, configured and customized by a set of DAML
ontologies.
– Xtalks will be genuinely useful application capable of
supporting 1000’s of real users.
– Include a generic personal agent that advanced users can adapt
and experiment with.
– http://xtalks.org/ will be a site of meta-information on all
known Xtalk-based sites.
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Just add water…
Unpack Xtalks and place in a medium sized Linux box
Sift the DAML config file
Stir in one DAML topic ontology
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
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
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And Xtalks becomes…
• bioTalks or
• lingTalks or
• historyTalks or
• yogaLectures or
• pentagonSeminars or
• bostonRaves or
• mitLcsEvents or
•…
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Benefits
• Xtalks 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 Xtalks will make lots of
DAML available on the web.
• Xtalks will provide a good DAML application with
which people can experiment and extend.
• Having a running collection of independent Xtalks
sites will enable interesting research in distributed
systems.
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What’s needed?
• Re-engineering of ITTALKS to be more DAML
driven
• Tools to help configure Xtalks
– 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 http://xtalks.sourceforge.net/
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Xtalks
• ITTALKS is a useful, fairly sophisticated web
application that used DAML in an integral way
• We can generalize this to Xtalks, 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.
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