The DARPA Agent Markup Language Homepage

The World Wide Web (WWW) contains a large amount information which is expanding at a rapid rate. Most of that information is currently being represented using the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which is designed to allow web developers to display information in a way that is accessible to humans for viewing via web browsers. While HTML allows us to visualize the information on the web, it doesn't provide much capability to describe the information in ways that facilitate the use of software programs to find or interpret it. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has developed the Extensible Markup Language (XML) which allows information to be more accurately described using tags. As an example, the word Algol on a web site might represent a computer language, a star or an oceanographic research ship. The use of XML to provide metadata markup, such as Algol, makes the meaning of the work unambiguous. However, XML has a limited capability to describe the relationships (schemas or ontologies) with respect to objects. The use of ontologies provides a very powerful way to describe objects and their relationships to other objects. The DAML language is being developed as an extension to XML and the Resource Description Framework (RDF). The latest release of the language (DAML+OIL) provides a rich set of constructs with which to create ontologies and to markup information so that it is machine readable and understandable.