Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a markup language for publishing and sharing data using ontologies on the Internet. OWL is a vocabulary extension of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and is derived from the [[DAML+OIL]] Web Ontology Language (see also DAML and OIL). Together with RDF and other components, these tools make up the Semantic Web project.
OWL represents the meanings of terms in vocabularies and the relationships between those terms in a way that is suitable for processing by software.
The OWL specification is maintained by the
Background
The W3C Web Ontology Language (OWL) is playing an important role in an increasing number and range of applications, and is the focus of research into tools, reasoning techniques, formal foundations and language extensions. This level of experience with OWL means that the community is now in a good position to discuss how OWL be applied, adapted and extended to fulfil current and future application demands. In particular, the initial design of OWL was conservative in several ways: it excluded constructs that did not have considerable
The future of Web languages seems to be the Semantic Web, and OWL is one of its activities. Now a question arises: What does OWL provide that XML and XML Schema don't? The answer is outlined below.
1. XML provides a syntax for structured documents, but doesn't define semantic constraints on the meaning of the documents.
2. XML Schema is a language for restricting the structure of XML documents.
3. RDF is a data model for objects ("resources") and relations between them; it provides simple semantics for this data model, and these data models can be
The formal specification of knowledge, which is also known as knowledge representation, is not new. Long before the Semantic Web knowledge representation has been part of several studies. Starting in the seventies AI-scientists startet to work on predicate logics for the formal specification of knowledge. Later on knowledge representation with description logics, which are a subtype of predicate logics. Description logics powress is restriced compared to predicate logics but allows efficient reasoning.
In 2001 Tim Berners-Lee and others published an
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