Web Ontology Language (OWL)
See this video presentation: http://videolectures.net/iswc08_panel_schneider_owl/
The definition of OWL, the ontology language underlying the Semantic Web, is based on formal representation methods. This provides benefits, in that tools have a firm definition of what they are supposed to do, but can have problems, due to difficulty or expense of building tools or mismatch with needs. The panel will discuss whether the general idea of designing standard Semantic Web languages with steadily increasing power (e.g., the progression from RDF to RDFS to OWL to OWL 2 to …) all based on formal methods is the right way to support the Semantic Web. What level of expressive power does the Semantic Web need? How should standard Semantic Web languages be designed? Does the Semantic Web even need formality?
Contents: Specifications | Articles and Presentations | Projects and Applications | Ontologies |
Nearby: Semantic Web Advanced Development | SemWeb IG | OWL FAQ | RDF
6 September 2007: W3C Launches the OWL Working Group.
A. OWL is a Web Ontology language. Where earlier languages have been used to develop tools and ontologies for specific user communities (particularly in the sciences and in company-specific e-commerce applications), they were not defined to be compatible with the architecture of the World Wide Web in general, and the Semantic Web in particular.
OWL uses both URIs for naming and the description framework for the Web provided by RDF to add the following capabilities to ontologies:
- Ability to be distributed across many systems
- Scalability to Web needs
- Compatibility with Web standards for accessibility and internationalization
- Openess and extensiblility
OWL builds on RDF and RDF Schema and adds more vocabulary for describing properties and classes: among others, relations between classes (e.g. disjointness), cardinality (e.g. “exactly one”), equality, richer typing of properties, characteristics of properties (e.g. symmetry), and enumerated classes.
To participate in the development of the next versions of OWL, consider joining the OWL Working Group.
OWL Specification Development
The OWL suite of specifications consist of:
- OWL Web Ontology Language Overview
W3C Recommendation 10 Feb 2004. Deborah L. McGuinness and Frank van Harmelen eds.formerly Feature Synopsis for OWL Lite and OWL
The OWL Web Ontology Language is designed for use by applications that need to process the content of information instead of just presenting information to humans. OWL facilitates greater machine interpretability of Web content than that supported by XML, RDF, and RDF Schema (RDF-S) by providing additional vocabulary along with a formal semantics. OWL has three increasingly-expressive sublanguages: OWL Lite, OWL DL, and OWL Full.
W3C Recommendation 10 Feb 2004, 12 November 2002. Dean, Schreiber, eds.
W3C Recommendation 10 Feb 2004. Jeremy J. Carroll, Jos De Roo, eds.
W3C Recommendation 10 Feb 2004. Jeff Heflin, ed.
Tutorials
A set of tutorials on OWL and related Semantic Web technologies is maintained by the Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group.
Articles and Presentations
We do not currently keep a separate list of OWL presentations and articles. See the Semantic Web presentations, W3C in The Press and Resource Description Framework Press.
Tools, Projects and Applications
The following is a small sample of the growing set of tools, projects and applications utilizing OWL.
Demos / Portals
- AIFB SEmantic PortAL – The Institute AIFB web site of the University of Karlsruhe provides annotated pages which contain dynamically generated machine processable content in form of OWL annotations.
- The AKT Portal at the University of Southampton is largely based on ontologies, and is now using OWL.
- The University of Maryland Baltimore County (Finin) has developed two demos using OWL ( Finin 7May)
- BioPax – A Data Exchange Format for Biological Pathways has been using OWL
- The W3C tech reports – related to the “multimedia collections” use case
- ( The MINDSWAP project web site) uses OWL to generate all the web pages and “custom home pages” for members of the research group, as well as for doing photo markup. ( Hendler 6May)
- The OWL-generated Comment Status List submitted for the CR request for OWL was generated by a combination of OWL tools.
The listing of developer’s tools on this page has been removed in July 2006, in favor of the more comprehensive page on the W3C Wiki. By moving this list to the Wiki, the Semantic Web community at large can contribute in keeping that information up-to-date.
