Accessing Information and Services on the DAML-Enabled Web

The DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) program aims to allow one to mark up web pages to indicate the meaning of their content; it is intended that the results delivered by a DAML-enabled browser will more closely match the intentions of the user than is possible with today's syntactically oriented search engines.

In this paper we present our vision of a DAML-enabled search architecture. We present a set of queries of increasing complexity that should be answered efficiently in a Semantic Web. We describe several scenarios illustrating how queries are processed, identifying the main software components necessary to facilitate the search. We examine the issue of inference in search, and we address how to characterize procedures and services in DAML, enabling a DAML query language to find web sites with specified capabilities.