DARPA Agent Markup Language

The DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) was the name of a US funding program at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) started in 1999 by then-Program Manager James Hendler, and later run by Murray Burke, Mark Greaves and Michael Pagels. The program focused on the creation of machine-readable representations for the Web. One of the Investigators working on the program was Tim Berners-Lee and to a great degree through his influence, working with the program managers, the effort worked to create technologies and demonstrations for what is now called the Semantic Web.

A primary outcome of the DAML program was the DAML language, an agent markup language based on RDF. This language was then followed by an extension entitled DAML+OIL which included researchers outside of the DARPA program in the design. The 2002 submission of the DAML+OIL language to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) captures the work done by DAML contractors and the EU/U.S. ad hoc Joint Committee on Markup Languages. This submission was the starting point for the language (later called OWL) to be developed by W3C's web ontology working group, WebOnt.

DAML+OIL was a syntax, layered on RDF and XML, that could be used to describe sets of facts making up an ontology.

DAML+OIL had its roots in three main languages - DAML, as described above, OIL (Ontology Inference Layer) and SHOE, an earlier US research project.

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