1 X talks Tim Finin University of Maryland Baltimore County Joint work with JHU/APL and MIT/Sloan DAML PI Meeting July 18, 2001 ask-all advertisesubscribe.

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XXtalkstalksTim FininTim Finin

University of Maryland Baltimore County

Joint work with JHU/APL and MIT/Sloan

DAML PI Meeting

July 18, 2001

ask-all

advertisesubscribe

tellrecommend

register

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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 andother 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 descriptionsfor 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 publishedin HTML

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… and inDAML

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ITTALKS Architecture

Web server + Java servlets

DAMLreasoning

engine

DAMLreasoning

engine

<daml></daml>

<daml></daml>

<daml></daml>

<daml></daml>

DAML files

Agents

Databases

People

RDBMSRDBMSDB

Email, HTML, SMS, WAP

FIPA ACL, KQML, DAML

SQLHTTP, KQML, DAML, Prolog

MapBlast, CiteSeer,Google, …HTTP

HTTP, WebScraping

Web Services

ApacheTomcat

People

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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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ITTALKSagent

Travelagent

Calendaragent

Useragent

DAMLreasoning engine

BrokerAgent

AgentNameServer

user’s daml profile

mapquest

user’s calendar appe.g. MS Outlook

ITTALKS app

DAML reasonerCommon agent infrastructure

KQML

API

Communicationprotocol

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ITAALKS and agentscurrent working prototype

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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…

(1) Unpack Xtalks and place in a medium sized Linux box

(2) Sift the DAML config file

(3) Stir in one DAML topic ontology

(4) 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

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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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• 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.

XXtalkstalks

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