Xtalks Tim Finin askall subscribe advertise University of
Xtalks Tim Finin ask-all subscribe advertise University of Maryland Baltimore County Joint work with JHU/APL and MIT/Sloan tell recommend register DAML PI Meeting July 18, 2001 1
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 2
1 ITTALKS 1. ITTALKS is a database driven web site of IT related talks at UMBC and other institutions. The database contains information on 1. Seminar events 2. People (speakers, hosts, users, …) 3. Places (rooms, institutions, …) 2. This database is used to dynamically generate web pages and DAML descriptions for the talks and related information. 3. 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/ 3
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Registered users create profiles (encoded in DAML) describing their preferences, attributes and interests. 5
Talks are published in HTML 7
… and in DAML 8
ITTALKS Architecture Web server + Java servlets People Web Services Map. Blast, Cite. Seer, Google, … HTTP Email, HTML, SMS, WAP HTTP, Web. Scraping Agents Apache Tomcat People FIPA ACL, KQML, DAML HT TP SQL , K QM L, D AM L, P DB RDBMS Databases rol <daml> </daml> og DAML reasoning engine DAML files 10
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. 11
ITAALKS and agents current working prototype ITTALKS app 10 1 mapquest 18 ITTALKS agent Travel agent 17 user’s daml profile 11 Communication protocol KQML 9 2 API 12 User agent 3 DAML reasoning engine DAML reasoner 8 16 13 5 Calendar agent 14 7 15 4 Broker Agent 6 Agent Name Server Common agent infrastructure user’s calendar app e. g. MS Outlook 17
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. 19
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) 20
And Xtalks becomes… • bio. Talks or • ling. Talks or • history. Talks or • yoga. Lectures or • pentagon. Seminars or • boston. Raves or • mit. Lcs. Events or • … 21
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. 22
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/ 23
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. 24
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