OWL Web ontology language overview

The OWL Web Ontology Language is designed for use by applications that need to process the content of information instead of just presenting information to humans. OWL 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 has three increasingly-expressive sublanguages: OWL Lite, OWL DL, and OWL Full. This document is written for readers who want a first impression of the capabilities of OWL. It provides an introduction to OWL by informally describing the features of each of the sublanguages of OWL. Some knowledge of RDF Schema is useful for understanding this document, but not essential. After this document, interested readers may turn to the OWL Guide for more detailed descriptions and extensive examples on the features of OWL. The normative formal definition of OWL can be found in the OWL Semantics and Abstract Syntax. Status of this document OWL Web Ontology Language Overview https://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/ 1 de 14 09/05/2017 08:32 a.m. This document has been reviewed by W3C Members and other interested parties, and it has been endorsed by the Director as a W3C Recommendation. W3C's role in making the Recommendation is to draw attention to the specification and to promote its widespread deployment. This enhances the functionality and interoperability of the Web. This is one of six parts of the W3C Recommendation for OWL, the Web Ontology Language. It has been developed by the Web Ontology Working Group as part of the W3C Semantic Web Activity (Activity Statement, Group Charter) for publication on 10 February 2004. The design of OWL expressed in earlier versions of these documents has been widely reviewed and satisfies the Working Group's technical requirements. The Working Group has addressed all comments received, making changes as necessary. Changes to this document since the Proposed Recommendation version are detailed in the change log. Comments are welcome at public-webont-comments@w3.org (archive) and general discussion of related technology is welcome at www-rdf-logic@w3.org (archive). A list of implementations is available. The W3C maintains a list of any patent disclosures related to this work. This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. Other documents may supersede this document. A list of current W3C publications and the latest revision of this technical report can be found in the W3C technical reports index at http://www.w3.org/TR/.