OWL

OWL (because WOL wasn't good enough) stands for Web Ontology Language. As it says on the tin this is a language for expressing ontologies. Simply put an ontology is a representation of terms (things) and their interrelationships.

OWL is a revision of the DAML + OIL web ontology language. The documentation on OWL on the w3c website is, like RDF broken down into 6 documents:

• OWL Overview
• OWL Guide
• OWL Reference
• OWL Semantics and Abstract Syntax
• OWL Web Ontology Language Test cases
• OWL Use Cases and Requirements

OWL is actually available in three sublanguages, each one an extension of the previous one.

• OWL Lite classification hierarchy and simple constraints
• OWL DL maximum expressiveness while retaining computational completeness
• OWL Full maximum expressiveness and syntactic freedom of RDF with no computational guarantees

OWL Lite ontology is an OWL DL ontology is an OWL Full ontology
OWL Lite conclusion is an OWL DL conclusion is an OWL Full conclusion

The Overview provides an introduction as well as a description of each of the OWL Schema features. The Guide then provides an extended example which is a useful read to get the concepts down.

Well it was a while since I last posted so keeping this one short so I don't put myself off posting some more so that's it for now.