TheDARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) was the name of a US funding program at the USDefense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) started in 1999 by then-Program ManagerJames Hendler, and later run by Murray Burke, Mark Greaves andMichael Pagels. The program focused on the creation of machine-readable representations for the Web.
One of the Investigators working on the program wasTim Berners-Lee. Working with the program managers and other participants, Tim helped shape the effort to create technologies and demonstrations for what is now called theSemantic Web, leading in turn to the growth ofknowledge graph technology.
A primary outcome of the DAML program was the DAML language, anagentmarkup language based onRDF. This language was followed by an extension entitledDAML+OIL which included researchers outside of the DARPA program in the design. The 2002 submission of the DAML+OIL language to theWorld Wide Web Consortium (W3C) captures the work done by DAML contractors and theEU/U.S. ad hoc Joint Committee on Agent Markup Languages. This submission was the starting point for the language (later calledOWL) to be developed by W3C's web ontologyworking group, WebOnt.
DAML+OIL was a syntax, layered onRDF andXML, that could be used to describe sets of facts making up anontology.
DAML+OIL had its roots in three main languages - DAML, as described above,OIL (Ontology Inference Layer) andSHOE, an earlier US research project.
A major innovation of the languages was to use RDF and XML for a basis, and to use RDF namespaces to organize and assist with the integration of arbitrarily many different and incompatible ontologies.
Articulation ontologies can link these competing ontologies through codification of analogous subsets in aneutral point of view, as is done in theWikipedia.
Current ontology research derived in part from DAML is leading toward the expression of ontologies and rules for reasoning andaction.
Much of the work in DAML has now been incorporated intoRDF Schema, theOWL and their successor languages and technologies includingschema.org