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OWL: Web Ontology Language

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Encyclopedia of Database Systems

Synonyms

Web ontology language

Definition

The Web Ontology Language OWL is a language for defining ontologies on the Web. An OWL Ontology describes a domain in terms of classes, properties and individuals and may include rich descriptions of the characteristics of those objects. OWL ontologies can be used to describe the properties of Web resources. Where earlier representation languages have been used to develop tools and ontologies for specific user-communities in areas such as sciences, health and e-commerce, they were not necessarily designed to be compatible with the World Wide Web, or more specifically the Semantic Web, as is the case with OWL.

Features of OWL are a collection of expressive operators for concept description including boolean operators (intersection, union and complement), plus explicit quantifiers for properties and relationships; the ability to specify characteristics of properties, such as transitivity or domains and ranges; a well defined semantics...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Baader F., Calvanese D., McGuinness D.L., Nardi D., and Patel-Schneider P.F. (eds.). The Description Logic Handbook: Theory, Implementation, and Applications. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2003.

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  2. Horrocks I., Patel-Schneider P.F., and van Harmelen F. From SHIQ and RDF to OWL: the making of a web ontology language. J. Web Semant., 1(1):7–26, 2003.

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  3. World Wide Web Consortium. Web Ontology Language (OWL). W3C Recommendation. Available at: http://www.w3.org/2004/OWL/.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Sean Bechhofer

Authors
  1. Sean Bechhofer
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Bechhofer, S. (2009). OWL: Web Ontology Language. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_1073

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