[DAS] discussion document for das/2

[Bradley Marshall]

> DAML OIL is pretty cool (I just started reading
> about it today).  I'm open to 
> using it to describe the relationships among
> annotations.  I'm not clear on 
> how exactly the DAML world interoperates with the
> WSDL, XML Schema, and 
> SOAP worlds.  Could someone explain?
> 
> Lincoln


Essentially, DAML+OIL is a different approach than the
WSDL, SOAP, XML Schema world.  This is not to say that
they're totally seperate.  ie, a DAML+OIL ontology can
 in many cases be described with XML schema.  However,
I don't think this is the norm.  There is a DAML+OIL
format that is analogous to WSDL.  And, since they're
all XML, you can build converters between them using
XSLT.

The important thing to understand about DAML+OIL is
it's a layer on top of RDF.  RDF is very important,
since it allows you to build arbitrary graph
structures which can be encoded in XML.  This is a big
benefit when you consider that vanilla XML only allows
you to create tree structures.  Also, since RDF relies
on universal identifiers, there is a straightforward
way to combine the information from multiple documents
into one graph, another advantage over vanilla XML.

Brad 


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