FACTOID # 78: 22% of New Zealanders have used cannabis.
 
 Home   Encyclopedia   Statistics   Countries A-Z   Flags   Maps   Education   Forum   FAQ   About 
 
WHAT'S NEW
RECENT ARTICLES
More Recent Articles »
 

SEARCH ALL

FACTS & STATISTICS    Advanced view

Search encyclopedia, statistics and forums:

 

 

(* = Graphable)

 

 


Encyclopedia > Web Ontology Language

The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a language for defining and instantiating Web ontologies.[1] An OWL ontology may include descriptions of classes, along with their related properties and instances. OWL is designed for use by applications that need to process the content of information instead of just presenting information to humans. It 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 is based on earlier languages OIL and DAML+OIL, and is now a W3C recommendation. WWWs historical logo designed by Robert Cailliau The World Wide Web (or the Web) is a system of interlinked, hypertext documents that runs over the Internet. ... In both computer science and information science, an ontology is a data model that represents a domain and is used to reason about the objects in that domain and the relations between them. ... The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a W3C-recommended general-purpose markup language that supports a wide variety of applications. ... Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a family of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications originally designed as a metadata model but which has come to be used as a general method of modeling information, through a variety of syntax formats. ... RDF Schema is a language for describing vocabularies in RDF. RDF Schema is a semantic extension of RDF. It provides mechanisms for describing groups of related resources and the relationships between these resources. ... The introduction to this article provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject matter. ... OIL (Ontology Inference Layer or Ontology Interchange Language) can be regarded as an Ontology infrastructure for the Semantic Web (see paper OIL: An Ontology Infrastructure for the Semantic Web, IEEE Intelligent Systems, March/April 2001). ... DAML+OIL is a successor language to DAML and OIL that combines features of both. ... It has been suggested that W3C Markup Validation Service be merged into this article or section. ... A W3C Recommendation is the final stage of a ratification process of the W3C working group concerning the standard. ...


OWL is seen as a major technology for the future implementation of a Semantic Web. It 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. The semantic web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a form that can be understood, interpreted and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily. ...


OWL was designed to provide a common way to process the semantic content of web information. It was developed to augment the facilities for expressing semantics (meaning) provided by XML, RDF, and RDF-S. Consequently, it may be considered an evolution of these web languages in terms of its ability to represent machine-interpretable semantic content on the web. Since OWL is based on XML, OWL information can be easily exchanged between different types of computers using different operating systems, and application languages. Because the language is intended to be read by computer applications, it is sometimes not considered to be human-readable, although this may be a tool issue. OWL is being used to create standards that provide a framework for asset management, enterprise integration, and data sharing on the Web. An operating system (OS) is a set of computer programs that manage the hardware and software resources of a computer. ... A programming language is an artificial language that can be used to control the behavior of a machine, particularly a computer. ... This article or section does not cite any references or sources. ...


An extended version of OWL, (sometimes called OWL 1.1, but with no official status) has been proposed which includes increased expressiveness, a simpler data model and serialization, and a collection of well-defined sub-languages each with known computational properties.

Contents

History

A number of research efforts during the mid to late 1990s explored how the idea of knowledge representation (KR) from AI could be made useful on the World Wide Web. These included languages based on HTML (called SHOE), XML (called XOL, later OIL), and various frame-based KR languages and knowledge acquisition approaches. Knowledge representation is an issue that arises in both cognitive science and artificial intelligence. ... Garry Kasparov playing against Deep Blue, the first machine to win a chess game against a reigning world champion. ... HTML, short for Hypertext Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for the creation of web pages. ... In the semantic web, Simple HTML Ontology Extensions are a small set of HTML extensions designed to give web pages semantic meaning by allowing information such as class, subclass and property relationships. ... OIL (Ontology Inference Layer or Ontology Interchange Language) can be regarded as an Ontology infrastructure for the Semantic Web (see paper OIL: An Ontology Infrastructure for the Semantic Web, IEEE Intelligent Systems, March/April 2001). ...


OWL DL is based in part on the description logic >mathcal{SHOIN} (D) and also on a number of earlier KR systems known as frame-based systems. Its subset OWL Lite is based on the less expressive logic >mathcal{SHIF} (D). All reasoning tasks in both OWL DL and OWL Lite can be reduced to knowledge based (KB) satisfiability. OWL Full operates outside the bounds of description logic, allowing more power and expressivity and having fewer constraints on use, but at the cost of decidability. (OWL Full's semantics is based on the semantics of RDF.) OWL is encoded in RDF/XML documents.[2] Description logics (DL) are a family of knowledge representation languages which can be used to represent the terminological knowledge of an application domain in a structured and formally well-understood way. ...


The OWL Language is a research-based[3] revision of the DAML+OIL web ontology language. DAML+OIL was developed by a group called the "US/UK ad hoc Joint Working Group on Agent Markup Languages" which was jointly funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under the DAML program and the EU's IST funding project. Motto: (Out Of Many, One) (traditional) In God We Trust (1956 to date) Anthem: The Star-Spangled Banner Capital Washington D.C. Largest city New York City None at federal level (English de facto) Government Federal constitutional republic  - President George Walker Bush (R)  - Vice President Dick Cheney (R) Independence from... The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technology for use by the military. ... The DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) is a agent markup language developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the semantic web. ... One of the thematic priorities in the European Union Sixth Framework Programme for research and technological development set for the period 2002-2006. ...


The World Wide Web Consortium created the "Web Ontology Working Group" which began work on November 1, 2001 chaired by James Hendler and Guus Schreiber. The first working drafts of the abstract syntax, reference and synopsis were published in July 2002. The OWL documents became a formal W3C recommendation on February 10, 2004 and the working group was disbanded on May 31, 2004.[4] It has been suggested that W3C Markup Validation Service be merged into this article or section. ... November 1 is the 305th day of the year (306th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar, with 60 days remaining. ... 2001 (MMI) was a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar. ... James Hendler is one of the originators of the Semantic Web. ... Abstract syntax is a representation of data (typically either a message passing over a communications link or a computer program being compiled) which is independent of machine-oriented structures and encodings and also of the physical representation of the data (called concrete syntax in the case of compilation or transfer... February 10 is the 41st day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... shelby was here 2004 (MMIV) was a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... May 31 is the 151st day of the year (152nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... shelby was here 2004 (MMIV) was a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ...


Within the working group, effort to identify design goals and requirements was led by Jeff Heflin. The other members of the working group, some with more than a decade of experience designing knowledge-based systems, contributed over 25 use cases, which were later boiled down into defining a set of use cases. [5]


Sublanguages

OWL currently has three sublanguages (sometimes also referred to as 'species'): OWL Lite, OWL DL, and OWL Full. These three increasingly expressive sublanguages are designed for use by specific communities of implementers and users.

  • OWL Lite supports those users primarily needing a classification hierarchy and simple constraints. For example, while it supports cardinality constraints, it only permits cardinality values of 0 or 1. It should be simpler to provide tool support for OWL Lite than its more expressive relatives, and OWL Lite provides a quick migration path for thesauri and other taxonomies. OWL Lite also has a lower formal complexity than OWL DL; see the section on OWL Lite in the OWL Reference for further details.
  • OWL DL supports those users who want the maximum expressiveness while retaining computational completeness (all conclusions are guaranteed to be computed) and decidability (all computations will finish in finite time). OWL DL includes all OWL language constructs, but they can be used only under certain restrictions (for example, while a class may be a subclass of many classes, a class cannot be an instance of another class). OWL DL is so named due to its correspondence with description logic, a field of research that has studied the logics that form the formal foundation of OWL.
  • OWL Full is meant for users who want maximum expressiveness and the syntactic freedom of RDF with no computational guarantees. For example, in OWL Full a class can be treated simultaneously as a collection of individuals and as an individual in its own right. OWL Full allows an ontology to augment the meaning of the pre-defined (RDF or OWL) vocabulary. It is unlikely that any reasoning software will be able to support complete reasoning for every feature of OWL Full.

Each of these sublanguages is an extension of its simpler predecessor, both in what can be legally expressed and in what can be validly concluded. The following set of relations hold. Their inverses do not. In mathematics, the cardinality of a set is a measure of the number of elements of the set. There are two approaches to cardinality – one which compares sets directly using bijections and injections, and another which uses cardinal numbers. ... The word thesaurus is derived from 16th century New Latin, in turn from Latin thesaurus, from ancient Greek thesauros, store-house, treasury. Besides its meaning as a treasury or storehouse, it more commonly means a listing of words with similar, related, or opposite meanings (this new meaning of thesaurus dates... Look up taxonomy in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... A logical system or theory is decidable if the set of all well-formed formulas valid in the system is decidable. ... Description logics (DL) are a family of knowledge representation languages which can be used to represent the terminological knowledge of an application domain in a structured and formally well-understood way. ...

  • Every legal OWL Lite ontology is a legal OWL DL ontology.
  • Every legal OWL DL ontology is a legal OWL Full ontology.
  • Every valid OWL Lite conclusion is a valid OWL DL conclusion.
  • Every valid OWL DL conclusion is a valid OWL Full conclusion.

The acronym

Some may claim that the correct acronym for Web Ontology Language should be WOL instead of OWL. Although the character Owl from Winnie the Pooh wrote his name WOL, the acronym OWL was proposed without reference to that character, as an easily pronounced acronym that would yield good logos, suggest wisdom, and honor William A. Martin's One World Language KR project from the 1970s. And, to quote Guus Schreiber, "Why not be inconsistent in at least one aspect of a language which is all about consistency?" Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations, such as NATO, laser, that are formed using the initial letters of words or word parts in a phrase or name. ... Disneys interpretation of Owl Owl is a fictional character in A. A. Milnes Winnie-the-Pooh books and in Disneys Winnie the Pooh cartoons. ... Winnie-the-Pooh Bear, sometimes referred to as Pooh, is a fictional bear created by A. A. Milne. ... William A. Martin (1938-1981) was a computer scientist from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. ... Knowledge representation is an issue that arises in both cognitive science and artificial intelligence. ...


See also

In both computer science and information science, an ontology is a data model that represents a domain and is used to reason about the objects in that domain and the relations between them. ... The semantic web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a form that can be understood, interpreted and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily. ... common logic (CL) is a first-order logical language, intended for information exchange and transmission. ... Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a family of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications originally designed as a metadata model but which has come to be used as a general method of modeling information, through a variety of syntax formats. ... FOAF (Friend of a Friend) is a project for machine-readable modelling of homepage-like content and social networks founded by Libby Miller and Dan Brickley. ... Description Of A Career (DOAC) is a semantic vocabulary created by Ramon A. Parada to describe professional capabilities of a worker. ... The Meta-Object Facility (MOF), is an Object Management Group (OMG) standard for Model Driven Engineering. ... In the field of software engineering, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a standardized specification language for object modeling. ... Object Management Group (OMG) is a consortium, originally aimed at setting standards for distributed object-oriented systems, and is now focused on modeling (programs, systems and business processes) and model-based standards in some 20 vertical markets. ... The introduction to this article provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject matter. ...

References

  1. ^ OWL Web Ontology Language Guide: W3C Recommendation 10 February 2004. W3C (2004-02-10).
  2. ^ Ian Horrocks & Peter F. Patel-Schneider. Reducing OWL Entailment to Description Logic Satisfiability.
  3. ^ Feature Synopsis for OWL Lite and OWL: W3C Working Draft 29 July 2002. W3C (2002-07-29).
  4. ^ Web-Ontology (WebOnt) Working Group (Closed). W3C.
  5. ^ OWL Web Ontology Language Use Cases and Requirements: W3C Recommendation 10 February 2004. W3C (2004-02-10).

External links

Image File history File links Information_icon. ...

OWL ontologies

Some existing OWL ontologies may be browsed using an editor such as Protégé-OWL to edit the ontologies posted at the Protégé web site.


There is a large collection of biomedical ontologies available through the OBO Foundry, which are available on their download page, as well a number of others hosted at the NCBO BioPortal.


Other ontologies can be found by searching for appropriate search terms with the filetype set to ".owl" or ".rdf" or by using the Swoogle semantic web search engine. Swoogle is a search engine for Semantic Web documents, terms and data found on the Web. ...


  Results from FactBites:
 
OWL Web Ontology Language Use Cases and Requirements (6682 words)
Ontologies figure prominently in the emerging Semantic Web as a way of representing the semantics of documents and enabling the semantics to be used by web applications and intelligent agents.
Thus, an ontology language will be used to describe the characteristics of devices, the means of access to such devices, the policy established by the owner for use of a device, and other technical constraints and requirements that affect incorporating a device into a ubiquitous computing network.
Ontologies may need to change because there were errors in prior versions, because a new way of modeling the domain is preferred, or because new terminology has been created (e.g., as the result of the invention of new technology).
  More results at FactBites »


 

COMMENTARY     


Share your thoughts, questions and commentary here
Your name
Your comments
Please enter the 5-letter protection code

Want to know more?
Search encyclopedia, statistics and forums:

 


Lesson Plans | Student Area | Student FAQ | Reviews | Press Releases |  Feeds | Contact
The Wikipedia article included on this page is licensed under the GFDL.
Images may be subject to relevant owners' copyright.
All other elements are (c) copyright NationMaster.com 2003-5. All Rights Reserved.
Usage implies agreement with terms.