Web Ontology Language: OWL

In order to extend the limited expressiveness of RDF Schema, a more expressive Web Ontology Language (OWL) has been defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). In this chapter we analyse the limitations of RDF Schema and derive requirements for a richer Web Ontology Language. We then describe the three-layered architecture of the OWL language, and we describe all of the language constructs of OWL in some detail. The chapter concludes with two extensive examples of OWL ontologies.