Heraklion, Crete, 15th June 2001

The first meeting of the SIG took place on 15th June, 2001 at the OntoWeb kick-off workshop in Heraklion, Crete. An introduction to the SIG's aims and objectives was presented by Ian Horrocks and Frank van Harmelen prior to the SIG meeting proper.

Two invited talks were given at the SIG meeting. Peter Patel-Schneider gave a talk entitled ``The Genesis of DAML+OIL'' and Mike Dean gave a talk entitled ``Experiences with DAML+OIL''.

The SIG members agreed on the following concrete actions to be taken by the SIG:

• Provide input to the DAML+OIL joint committee, the RDF Core working group, and (later) the W3C working group on a web-ontology language.
  • First input from this meeting has already been incorporated in an input-document to the RDF Core working group, to be found at http://www.daml.org/listarchive/joint-committee/0505.html (based on material from the presentation by Peter Patel-Schneider).
  • Further input from this meeting is the requirement to retrieve all "relevant" or "applicable" properties for a given class. This is a very natural operation in frame-based languages, but not so in DL-based languages. It was widely felt that this is an important device in modelling practice, and must be made possible in DAML+OIL or its successors. The publication at http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~horrocks/Publications/download/2000/DL00-interfaces.ps.gz provides a possible characterisation of such a feature in a DL framework.

• Provide useability reports on various web-ontology languages, such as RDF Schema, DAML+OIL and its successors. The presentation by Mike Dean (see above) is the first example of such a useability report on DAML+OIL.

• Provide challenge problems for web-ontology languages.
  • Guus Schreiber provided three such challenge problems during the meeting:
    • "generic classes" (roughly: classes that are not allowed to have "direct" instances, i.e. instances that are not an instance of any subclass).
    • a flexible class/instance distinction
    • default rules
    Guus Schreiber will provide a short note on these and possibly other such problems.
  • The desription of Web-services (in the spirit of DAML-S) was seen as another important source of challenge problems. Pasqualino Assini is willing to lead this effort.

• Establish contacts with other relevant communities. People who volunteered to be our "ambassadors" for a number of such communities are:
  • Multi-media, Frank Nack <Frank.Nack@cwi.nl>
  • Linguistics, Alexander Maedche <maedche@fzi.de>
  • Medical and bio-informatics applications, Ian Horrocks <horrocks@cs.man.ac.uk>
  • Software Engineering, Uwe Assmann <uwe.assmann@ida.liu.se>
  • Machine Learning, Alexander Maedche <maedche@fzi.de>
  • Data Mining, Vojtek Svatek <svatek@vse.cz>
  • Topic Maps, Yannis Kalfoglou <y.kalfoglou@open.ac.uk>

List of participants:

Ian Horrocks <horrocks@cs.man.ac.uk>

Frank van Harmelen <Frank.van.Harmelen@cs.vu.nl>

Peter Patel-Schneider <pfps@research.bell-labs.com>

Harold Boley <boley@dfki.de>

Mike Dean <mdean@bbn.com>

Vojtech Svatek <svatek@vse.cz>

Marin Dimitrov <marin.dimitrov@sirma.bg>

Gerrit van der Veer <gerrit@acm.org>

Jurgen Nicklisch-Franken <jnf@persistag.com>

Christoph Wernhard <chw@persistag.com>

Frank Nack <Frank.Nack@cwi.nl>

Alexander Maedche <maedche@fzi.de>

Enrico Motta <e.motta@open.ac.uk>

Guus Schreiber <schreiber@swi.psy.uva.nl>

Pasqualino Assini <titto@essex.ac.uk>

Jeen Broekstra <jeen.broekstra@aidministrator.nl>

Anna Formica <formica@iasi.rm.cnr.it>

Oscar Corcho <ocorcho@fi.upm.es>

Uwe Assmann <uwe.assmann@ida.liu.se>