Introduction to OWL

Introduction to OWL

OWL, known as Web Ontology Language, is a network ontology language developed by W3C to semanticly describe the ontology.

OWL is a language for processing web information.

Basics you should have before you learn

Before you learn OWL, you should have a basic understanding of XML, XML namespaces, and RDF.

If you are learning about these projects first, please visit:

XML and RDF tutorials for W3Cschool.

What is OWL?

• OWL refers to the web ont body language
• OWL is built on top of the RDF
• OWL is used to process information on the web
• OWL is designed for computer interpretation
• OWL is not designed for human reading
• OWL is written by XML
• OWL has three seed languages
• OWL is a web standard

What is the ontogene?

The term "ontology" comes from philosophy, which is the study of the various entities of the world and how they are related to science.

For web, the ont body provides an accurate description of the relationship between web information and web information.

Why OWL?

OWL is part of the Semantic Web Vision - the objectives are:

• Web information has an exact meaning
• Web information can be understood and processed by a computer
• Computers can consolidate information from the Web

OWL is designed for computers to process information

OWL is designed to provide a common way to handle the content of Web information (rather than showing it).

OWL is designed to be read by computer applications (not by humans).

OWL is different from RDF

OWL has many similarities to RDF, but OWL is a more powerful language with greater machine interpretation capabilities than RDF.

OWL has a larger vocabulary and a more powerful language than RDF.

OWL sublingual

OWL has three sub-languages:

• OWL Lite
• OWL DL (including OWL Lite)
• OWL Full (including OWL DL)

OWL is written using XML

By using XML, OWL information can be exchanged between different types of computers that use different types of operating systems and application languages.

OWL is a web standard

OWL became a W3C recommendation in February 2004.

W3C recommendations (standards) are presented as web standards by the industry and the web community. The W3C recommendation is a stable specification developed by the W3C Working Group and reviewed by W3C members.

Documentation on OWL at w3c: http://www.w3.org/2004/OWL/