The DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) program, in conjunction with other international initiatives, is aggressively developing a language for describing the meaning of Web content as well as developing associated tools that take advantage of it.
WebScripter is a tool that enables ordinary users to easily and quickly assemble reports extracting and fusing information from multiple, heterogeneous DAMLized Web sources.
Users can then publish their reports on the Web and have them automatically refresh to contain the most up-to-date information. The published reports are DAMLized as well - thus WebScripter-produced data can itself become the source of further reports.
This gives information consumers considerable added value. By leveraging DAML, WebScripter enables users to quickly create reports that would be beyond them using today's technology. For example, intelligence analysts concerned with biological weapons proliferation can produce a report listing domestic experts in supercritical carbon dioxide who have attended chemistry conferences outside the US in the recent past, along with their publications, sources of funding, and with the names, dates, and programs of the conferences they attended. Not only is this report easy to create, it can then also be refreshed at desired intervals to track changes.
WebScripter and live reports also provide a strong incentive for information producers to
adopt DAML to mark up their information. Once a DAML-enabled document is published on the Web,
WebScripter makes it easy to access and republish portions of it as part of a larger report -- a
significant effort savings for information providers who currently need to maintain the same
information in multiple places. For example, university professors routinely publish a list of their
publications on their home page. Departments publish a list of all publications, and project pages
publish a list of project-related publications from all project members. Today, someone has to
manually construct these pages. When a professor publishes a new paper or makes a correction on an
existing one, he or she has to either manually update the other pages, or coordinate with the
appropriate people to have all the other lists updated. WebScripter eliminates the additional
work. Professors only need to mark up their personal paper publication with DAML, and the live
reports for the department and project-specific pages will automatically pick up the new publication
(e.g. every night), plus the live reports of interested colleagues will pick up the new paper if its
DAML classification terms match their stated interests. WebScripter thus eliminates overhead not
only for the organization, but also for the individual producing the information, who no longer
needs to coordinate the redistribution effort.