Ontology languages for the Semantic Web

being used in many other applications to explicitly declare the knowledge embedded in them. However, not only are ontologies useful for applications in which knowledge plays a key role, but they can also trigger a major change in current Web contents. This change is leading to the third generation of the Web—known as the Semantic Web—which has been defined as “the conceptual structuring of the Web in an explicit machine-readable way.”1 This definition does not differ too much from the one used for defining an ontology: “An ontology is an explicit, machinereadable specification of a shared conceptualization.”2 In fact, new ontology-based applications and knowledge architectures are developing for this new Web. A common claim for all of these approaches is the need for languages to represent the semantic information that this Web requires—solving the heterogeneous data exchange in this heterogeneous environment. Here, we don’t decide which language is best of the Semantic Web. Rather, our goal is to help developers find the most suitable language for their representation needs.