The document discusses the Web Ontology Language (OWL). It provides an overview of OWL, describing its three sublanguages - OWL Lite, OWL DL, and OWL Full - and their increasing expressiveness and reasoning complexity. The document also reviews the requirements for ontology languages and how OWL builds upon XML, RDF, and RDF Schema as the ontology language for the Semantic Web.

1. SeminarForWeb Ontology Language (OWL) Prepared by: Hussein Ali Ahmad Ghanim6/19/201121WEB ONTOLOGY LANGUAGE (OWL)

2. Web Ontology Language: OWLWeb Ontology Language Definition.OverviewRequirements for ontology languagesOWL Languages - OWL, RDF, RDF(s), XMLReferences6/19/201122WEB ONTOLOGY LANGUAGE (OWL)

3. Web Ontology LanguageThe Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies.The languages are characterised by formal semantics and RDF/XML-based serializations for the Semantic Web. Semantic Web led to requirement for a “web ontology language”6/19/201123WEB ONTOLOGY LANGUAGE (OWL)

4. OverviewFrom the overview of OWL1: 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.6/19/201124WEB ONTOLOGY LANGUAGE (OWL)

5. LiteDLFullThree species of OWLFull: uses all the OWL languages primitives. It also allows to combine these primitives in arbitrary ways with RDF and RDF Schema. This includes the possibility to change the meaning of the pre-defined primitives, by applying the language primitives to each other.The advantage of OWL Full is that it is fully upward compatible with RDF, both syntactically and semantically.The disadvantage of OWL Full is the language has become so powerful as to be undecidable, dashing any hope of complete (let alone efficient) reasoning support.DL = Description Logicis a sublanguage of OWL Full which restricts the way in which the constructors from OWL and RDF can be used.The advantage of this is that it permits efficient reasoning support.The disadvantage is that we loose full compatibility with RDF.6/19/201125WEB ONTOLOGY LANGUAGE (OWL)

6. Three species of OWLLite: - An ever further restriction limits OWL DL to a subset of the language constructors. For example, OWL Lite excludes enumerated classes, disjointness statements and arbitrary cardinality (among others).- The advantage of this is a language that is both easier to grasp (for users) and easier to implement (for tool builders).- The disadvantage is of course a restricted expressivity.6/19/201126WEB ONTOLOGY LANGUAGE (OWL)

7. Requirements for ontology languagesOntology languages allow users to write explicit, formal conceptualizations of domains models. The main requirements are:1. a well-defined syntax2. a well-defined semantics3. efficient reasoning support4. sufficient expressive power5. convenience of expression.6/19/201127WEB ONTOLOGY LANGUAGE (OWL)

8. What is OWL?W3C Recommendation, February 2004.web standard Web Ontology Language built on top of RDFRDF: the Resource Description Framework is an XML-based language to describe resources. for processing information on the web designed to be interpreted by computers, not for being read by people OWL is written in XML 6/19/201128WEB ONTOLOGY LANGUAGE (OWL)

9. Why OWL?OWL is a part of the "Semantic Web Vision" - a future where:Web information has exact meaning Web information can be processed by computers Computers can integrate information from the webOWL was designed to provide a common way to process the content of web information (instead of displaying it).be read by computer applications (instead of humans). 6/19/201129WEB ONTOLOGY LANGUAGE (OWL)

10. OWLInferenceRDF(S)IntegrationIntegrationRDFAnnotationXML OWL LanguagesWork on Semantic Web has defined of a collection or “stack” of languages.

11. These languages are then used to support the representation and use of metadata.

12. The languages provide basic machinery that we can use to represent the extra semantic information needed for the Semantic Web

13. XML

14. RDF

15. RDF(S)

16. OWL

17. …6/19/2011210WEB ONTOLOGY LANGUAGE (OWL)

18. OWL OWL: the language that is aimed to be the standardised and broadly accepted ontology language of the Semantic Web. OWL: is an ontology language designed for the Semantic Web

19. It provides a rich collection of operators for forming concept descriptions

20. It is a W3C standard, promoting interoperation and sharing between applications

21. It has been designed to be compatible with existing web standards6/19/2011211WEB ONTOLOGY LANGUAGE (OWL)

22. The OWL languageThere are different syntactic forms of OWL: RDF’s XML-based syntax (primary syntax for OWL) an XML-based syntax that does not follow the RDF conventions (more easily read by human users) see http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-xmlsyntax/ an abstract syntax (used in the language specification document) (much more compact and readable) see http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-semantics/ a graphic syntax based on the conventions of UML (an easy way for people to become familiar with OWL)6/19/2011212WEB ONTOLOGY LANGUAGE (OWL)