Re: [Tm4j-developers] how are we different to DAML

[Jack P. <jac...@th...>]

At 09:08 AM 2/22/2002 +0000, Kal Ahmed wrote:
>I would say one thing - ignore the markup argument. IMHO, the principle 
>part of DAML is the specification of the primitives with which one can 
>construct a rigorously defined ontology. The less significant part of DAML 
>is its representation as RDF. In fact, if I were wanting to represent an 
>ontology with a high degree of formal rigor (e.g. for later applying 
>inference tools to the data set), then I would probably look at using 
>DAML+OIL as an adjunct to the XTM map of the instance data. I could then 
>use transformation tools (XSLT ?) to generate an XTM representation of the 
>DAML+OIL ontology definition, while still using DAML+OIL tools to define 
>my ontology and XTM tools to map it to real world resources.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Kal

To which, I would like to point out that this is precisely the direction 
that Nexist is headed!  In the long run, I want Nexist to be based on open 
standards.  If you want a topic map from it, you get it in XTM.  If you 
want an ontology, you get that in DAML/OIL.

There exists, however, an open question: is there some canonical way to 
represent everything in the database such that it can come out any way you 
want it?  The idea being that you apply some transcoding scheme (i.e. XSLT) 
to some canonical "document" (Douglas Engelbart calls this an "iFile") to 
get the representation you want.

Cheers,
Jack