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Abbreviation | OWL |
---|---|
Status | Published |
Year started | 2004 |
Editors | Mike Dean (BBN Technologies), Guus Schreiber |
Base standards | Resource Description Framework, RDFS |
Related standards | SHACL |
Domain | Semantic Web |
Website | OWL Reference |
Abbreviation | OWL 2 |
---|---|
Status | Published |
Year started | 2009 |
Editors | W3C OWL Working Group |
Base standards | Resource Description Framework, RDFS |
Domain | Semantic Web |
Website | OWL 2 Overview |
The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies. Ontologies are a formal way to describe taxonomies and classification networks, essentially defining the structure of knowledge for various domains: the nouns representing classes of objects and the verbs representing relations between the objects.
Ontologies resemble class hierarchies in object-oriented programming but there are several critical differences. Class hierarchies are meant to represent structures used in source code that evolve fairly slowly (perhaps with monthly revisions) whereas ontologies are meant to represent information on the Internet and are expected to be evolving almost constantly. Similarly, ontologies are typically far more flexible as they are meant to represent information on the Internet coming from all sorts of heterogeneous data sources. Class hierarchies on the other hand tend to be fairly static and rely on far less diverse and more structured sources of data such as corporate databases. [1]
The OWL languages are characterized by formal semantics. They are built upon the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) standard for objects called the Resource Description Framework (RDF). [2] OWL and RDF have attracted significant academic, medical and commercial interest.
In October 2007, [3] a new W3C working group [4] was started to extend OWL with several new features as proposed in the OWL 1.1 member submission. [5] W3C announced the new version of OWL on 27 October 2009. [6] This new version, called OWL 2, soon found its way into semantic editors such as Protégé and semantic reasoners such as Pellet, [7] RacerPro, [8] FaCT++ [9] [10] and HermiT. [11]
The OWL family contains many species, serializations, syntaxes and specifications with similar names. OWL and OWL2 are used to refer to the 2004 and 2009 specifications, respectively. Full species names will be used, including specification version (for example, OWL2 EL). When referring more generally, OWL Family will be used. [12] [13] [14]
There is a long history of ontological development in philosophy and computer science. Since the 1990s, a number of research efforts have explored how the idea of knowledge representation (KR) from artificial intelligence (AI) could be made useful on the World Wide Web. These included languages based on HTML (called SHOE), based on XML (called XOL, later OIL), and various frame-based KR languages and knowledge acquisition approaches.
In 2000 in the United States, DARPA started development of DAML led by James Hendler. [15] [ self-published source ] In March 2001, the Joint EU/US Committee on Agent Markup Languages decided that DAML should be merged with OIL. [15] The EU/US ad hoc Joint Working Group on Agent Markup Languages was convened to develop DAML+OIL as a web ontology language. This group was jointly funded by the DARPA (under the DAML program) and the European Union's Information Society Technologies (IST) funding project. DAML+OIL was intended to be a thin layer above RDFS, [15] with formal semantics based on a description logic (DL). [16]
DAML+OIL is a particularly major influence on OWL; OWL's design was specifically based on DAML+OIL. [17]
The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries.
— World Wide Web Consortium, W3C Semantic Web Activity [18]
a declarative representation language influenced by ideas from knowledge representation
— World Wide Web Consortium, Metadata Activity [19]
In the late 1990s, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Metadata Activity started work on RDF Schema (RDFS), a language for RDF vocabulary sharing. The RDF became a W3C Recommendation in February 1999, and RDFS a Candidate Recommendation in March 2000. [19] In February 2001, the Semantic Web Activity replaced the Metadata Activity. [19] In 2004 (as part of a wider revision of RDF) RDFS became a W3C Recommendation. [20] Though RDFS provides some support for ontology specification, the need for a more expressive ontology language had become clear. [21] [ self-published source ]
As of Monday, the 31st of May, our working group will officially come to an end. We have achieved all that we were chartered to do, and I believe our work is being quite well appreciated.
— James Hendler and Guus Schreiber, Web-Ontology Working Group: Conclusions and Future Work [22]
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) created the Web-Ontology Working Group as part of their Semantic Web Activity. It began work on November 1, 2001 with co-chairs James Hendler and Guus Schreiber. [22] The first working drafts of the abstract syntax, reference and synopsis were published in July 2002. [22] OWL became a formal W3C recommendation on February 10, 2004 and the working group was disbanded on May 31, 2004. [22]
In 2005, at the OWL Experiences And Directions Workshop a consensus formed that recent advances in description logic would allow a more expressive revision to satisfy user requirements more comprehensively whilst retaining good computational properties. In December 2006, the OWL1.1 Member Submission [23] was made to the W3C. The W3C chartered the OWL Working Group as part of the Semantic Web Activity in September 2007. In April 2008, this group decided to call this new language OWL2, indicating a substantial revision. [24]
OWL 2 became a W3C recommendation in October 2009. OWL 2 introduces profiles to improve scalability in typical applications. [6] [25]
Why not be inconsistent in at least one aspect of a language which is all about consistency?
— Guus Schreiber, Why OWL and not WOL? [26]
OWL was chosen as an easily pronounced acronym that would yield good logos, suggest wisdom, and honor William A. Martin's One World Language knowledge representation project from the 1970s. [27] [28] [29]
A 2006 survey of ontologies available on the web collected 688 OWL ontologies. Of these, 199 were OWL Lite, 149 were OWL DL and 337 OWL Full (by syntax). They found that 19 ontologies had in excess of 2,000 classes, and that 6 had more than 10,000. The same survey collected 587 RDFS vocabularies. [30]
An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization.
The data described by an ontology in the OWL family is interpreted as a set of "individuals" and a set of "property assertions" which relate these individuals to each other. An ontology consists of a set of axioms which place constraints on sets of individuals (called "classes") and the types of relationships permitted between them. These axioms provide semantics by allowing systems to infer additional information based on the data explicitly provided. A full introduction to the expressive power of the OWL is provided in the W3C's OWL Guide. [32]
OWL ontologies can import other ontologies, adding information from the imported ontology to the current ontology. [17]
An ontology describing families might include axioms stating that a "hasMother" property is only present between two individuals when "hasParent" is also present, and that individuals of class "HasTypeOBlood" are never related via "hasParent" to members of the "HasTypeABBlood" class. If it is stated that the individual Harriet is related via "hasMother" to the individual Sue, and that Harriet is a member of the "HasTypeOBlood" class, then it can be inferred that Sue is not a member of "HasTypeABBlood". This is, however, only true if the concepts of "Parent" and "Mother" only mean biological parent or mother and not social parent or mother.
To choose a subset of first-order logic that is decidable, propositional logic was used, increasing its power by adding logics represented by convention with acronyms:
Letter or symbol of logic | Description |
---|---|
Inclusion and equivalence between classes, definition of atomic classes, universe class, intersection between classes, definitions of classes formed by elements that take part in relationships or have a relationship of a certain type only with elements of a certain class, congruence operator between individuals and an individual's membership in a class | |
adds to AL the empty class, the complement classes, the union of classes and the classes of elements that are in a certain relationship with elements of a certain class | |
Adds the definition of the transitivity of a relation to ALC | |
Inclusion and equivalence between relations | |
disjunction of properties, reflexivity, asymmetry, irreflexivity, relations composed of other relations, definition of non-relationship between two individuals | |
(One of) | creation of classes via list of all and only the individuals contained |
(Reverse) | definition of inverse property |
(Feature) | definition of functional properties |
(Number) | cardinality restriction: number of elements participating in a certain relationship less than, greater than or equal to a value n |
(Qualified) | like N, but the relationship can be qualified |
(Countable domain) | definition of domains (data types) to which a relationship can lead (e.g. "Mario is n years old") |
The W3C-endorsed OWL specification includes the definition of three variants of OWL, with different levels of expressiveness. These are OWL Lite, OWL DL and OWL Full (ordered by increasing expressiveness). Each of these sublanguages is a syntactic extension of its simpler predecessor. The following set of relations hold. Their inverses do not.
OWL Lite was originally intended to support those users primarily needing a classification hierarchy and simple constraints. For example, while it supports cardinality constraints, it only permits cardinality values of 0 or 1. It was hoped that it would be simpler to provide tool support for OWL Lite than its more expressive relatives, allowing quick migration path for systems using thesauri and other taxonomies. In practice, however, most of the expressiveness constraints placed on OWL Lite amount to little more than syntactic inconveniences: most of the constructs available in OWL DL can be built using complex combinations of OWL Lite features, and is equally expressive as the description logic . [24] Development of OWL Lite tools has thus proven to be almost as difficult as development of tools for OWL DL, and OWL Lite is not widely used. [24]
OWL DL is designed to provide the maximum expressiveness possible while retaining computational completeness (either φ or ¬φ holds), decidability (there is an effective procedure to determine whether φ is derivable or not), and the availability of practical reasoning algorithms. OWL DL includes all OWL language constructs, but they can be used only under certain restrictions (for example, number restrictions may not be placed upon properties which are declared to be transitive; and while a class may be a subclass of many classes, a class cannot be an instance of another class). OWL DL is so named due to its correspondence with description logic, a field of research that has studied the logics that form the formal foundation of OWL.
This one can be expressed as , using the letters logic above.
OWL Full is based on a different semantics from OWL Lite or OWL DL, and was designed to preserve some compatibility with RDF Schema. For example, in OWL Full a class can be treated simultaneously as a collection of individuals and as an individual in its own right; this is not permitted in OWL DL. OWL Full allows an ontology to augment the meaning of the pre-defined (RDF or OWL) vocabulary. OWL Full is undecidable, so no reasoning software is able to perform complete reasoning for it.
In OWL 2, there are three sublanguages of the language: [25]
The OWL family of languages supports a variety of syntaxes. It is useful to distinguish high level syntaxes aimed at specification from exchange syntaxes more suitable for general use.
These are close to the ontology structure of languages in the OWL family.
High level syntax is used to specify the OWL ontology structure and semantics. [34]
The OWL abstract syntax presents an ontology as a sequence of annotations, axioms and facts. Annotations carry machine and human oriented meta-data. Information about the classes, properties and individuals that compose the ontology is contained in axioms and facts only. Each class, property and individual is either anonymous or identified by an URI reference. Facts state data either about an individual or about a pair of individual identifiers (that the objects identified are distinct or the same). Axioms specify the characteristics of classes and properties. This style is similar to frame languages, and quite dissimilar to well known syntaxes for DLs and Resource Description Framework (RDF). [34]
Sean Bechhofer, et al. argue that though this syntax is hard to parse, it is quite concrete. They conclude that the name abstract syntax may be somewhat misleading. [35]
This syntax closely follows the structure of an OWL2 ontology. It is used by OWL2 to specify semantics, mappings to exchange syntaxes and profiles. [36]
Filename extension | .owx, .owl, .rdf |
---|---|
Internet media type | application/owl+xml, application/rdf+xml [37] |
Developed by | World Wide Web Consortium |
Standard | OWL 2 XML Serialization October 27, 2009 , OWL Reference February 10, 2004 |
Open format? | Yes |
Syntactic mappings into RDF are specified [34] [38] for languages in the OWL family. Several RDF serialization formats have been devised. Each leads to a syntax for languages in the OWL family through this mapping. RDF/XML is normative. [34] [38]
OWL2 specifies an XML serialization that closely models the structure of an OWL2 ontology. [39]
The Manchester Syntax is a compact, human readable syntax with a style close to frame languages. Variations are available for OWL and OWL2. Not all OWL and OWL2 ontologies can be expressed in this syntax. [40]
Consider an ontology for tea based on a Tea class. First, an ontology identifier is needed. Every OWL ontology must be identified by a URI (http://www.example.org/tea.owl, say). This example provides a sense of the syntax. To save space below, preambles and prefix definitions have been skipped.
Ontology(<http://example.org/tea.owl>Declaration(Class(:Tea)))
<OntologyontologyIRI="http://example.org/tea.owl"...><Prefixname="owl"IRI="http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#"/><Declaration><ClassIRI="Tea"/></Declaration></Ontology>
Ontology:<http://example.org/tea.owl>Class:Tea
<rdf:RDF...><owl:Ontologyrdf:about=""/><owl:Classrdf:about="#Tea"/></rdf:RDF>
<http://example.org/tea.owl>rdf:typeowl:Ontology.:Teardf:typeowl:Class.
OWL classes correspond to description logic (DL) concepts, OWL properties to DL roles, while individuals are called the same way in both the OWL and the DL terminology. [42]
In the beginning, IS-A was quite simple. Today, however, there are almost as many meanings for this inheritance link as there are knowledge-representation systems.
Early attempts to build large ontologies were plagued by a lack of clear definitions. Members of the OWL family have model theoretic formal semantics, and so have strong logical foundations.
Description logics are a family of logics that are decidable fragments of first-order logic with attractive and well-understood computational properties. OWL DL and OWL Lite semantics are based on DLs. [44] They combine a syntax for describing and exchanging ontologies, and formal semantics that gives them meaning. For example, OWL DL corresponds to the description logic, while OWL 2 corresponds to the logic. [45] Sound, complete, terminating reasoners (i.e. systems which are guaranteed to derive every consequence of the knowledge in an ontology) exist for these DLs.
OWL Full is intended to be compatible with RDF Schema (RDFS), and to be capable of augmenting the meanings of existing Resource Description Framework (RDF) vocabulary. [46] A model theory describes the formal semantics for RDF. [47] This interpretation provides the meaning of RDF and RDFS vocabulary. So, the meaning of OWL Full ontologies are defined by extension of the RDFS meaning, and OWL Full is a semantic extension of RDF. [48]
[The closed] world assumption implies that everything we don't know is false, while the open world assumption states that everything we don't know is undefined.
— Stefano Mazzocchi, Closed World vs. Open World: the First Semantic Web Battle [49]
The languages in the OWL family use the open world assumption. Under the open world assumption, if a statement cannot be proven to be true with current knowledge, we cannot draw the conclusion that the statement is false.
A relational database consists of sets of tuples with the same attributes. SQL is a query and management language for relational databases. Prolog is a logical programming language. Both use the closed world assumption.
The following tools include public ontology browsers:
The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0, is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable.
The DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) was the name of a US funding program at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) started in 1999 by then-Program Manager James Hendler, and later run by Murray Burke, Mark Greaves and Michael Pagels. The program focused on the creation of machine-readable representations for the Web.
The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a method to describe and exchange graph data. It was originally designed as a data model for metadata by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It provides a variety of syntax notations and data serialization formats, of which the most widely used is Turtle.
OIL can be regarded as an ontology infrastructure for the Semantic Web. OIL is based on concepts developed in Description Logic (DL) and frame-based systems and is compatible with RDFS.
Description logics (DL) are a family of formal knowledge representation languages. Many DLs are more expressive than propositional logic but less expressive than first-order logic. In contrast to the latter, the core reasoning problems for DLs are (usually) decidable, and efficient decision procedures have been designed and implemented for these problems. There are general, spatial, temporal, spatiotemporal, and fuzzy description logics, and each description logic features a different balance between expressive power and reasoning complexity by supporting different sets of mathematical constructors.
RDF Schema (Resource Description Framework Schema, variously abbreviated as RDFS, RDF(S), RDF-S, or RDF/S) is a set of classes with certain properties using the RDF extensible knowledge representation data model, providing basic elements for the description of ontologies. It uses various forms of RDF vocabularies, intended to structure RDF resources. RDF and RDFS can be saved in a triplestore, then one can extract some knowledge from them using a query language, like SPARQL.
SPARQL is an RDF query language—that is, a semantic query language for databases—able to retrieve and manipulate data stored in Resource Description Framework (RDF) format. It was made a standard by the RDF Data Access Working Group (DAWG) of the World Wide Web Consortium, and is recognized as one of the key technologies of the semantic web. On 15 January 2008, SPARQL 1.0 was acknowledged by W3C as an official recommendation, and SPARQL 1.1 in March, 2013.
RDFa or Resource Description Framework in Attributes is a W3C Recommendation that adds a set of attribute-level extensions to HTML, XHTML and various XML-based document types for embedding rich metadata within Web documents. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) data-model mapping enables its use for embedding RDF subject-predicate-object expressions within XHTML documents. It also enables the extraction of RDF model triples by compliant user agents.
The ultimate goal of semantic technology is to help machines understand data. To enable the encoding of semantics with the data, well-known technologies are RDF and OWL. These technologies formally represent the meaning involved in information. For example, ontology can describe concepts, relationships between things, and categories of things. These embedded semantics with the data offer significant advantages such as reasoning over data and dealing with heterogeneous data sources.
F-logic is a knowledge representation and ontology language. It combines the advantages of conceptual modeling with object-oriented, frame-based languages, and offers a declarative, compact and simple syntax, and the well-defined semantics of a logic programming language.
The Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) is a proposed language for the Semantic Web that can be used to express rules as well as logic, combining OWL DL or OWL Lite with a subset of the Rule Markup Language.
An RDF query language is a computer language, specifically a query language for databases, able to retrieve and manipulate data stored in Resource Description Framework (RDF) format.
Ian Robert Horrocks is a professor of computer science at the University of Oxford in the UK and a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. His research focuses on knowledge representation and reasoning, particularly ontology languages, description logic and optimised tableaux decision procedures.
A semantic reasoner, reasoning engine, rules engine, or simply a reasoner, is a piece of software able to infer logical consequences from a set of asserted facts or axioms. The notion of a semantic reasoner generalizes that of an inference engine, by providing a richer set of mechanisms to work with. The inference rules are commonly specified by means of an ontology language, and often a description logic language. Many reasoners use first-order predicate logic to perform reasoning; inference commonly proceeds by forward chaining and backward chaining. There are also examples of probabilistic reasoners, including non-axiomatic reasoning systems, and probabilistic logic networks.
The Semantic Web Stack, also known as Semantic Web Cake or Semantic Web Layer Cake, illustrates the architecture of the Semantic Web.
WSML or Web Service Modeling Language is a formal language that provides a syntax and semantics for the Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO).
In computer science, information science and systems engineering, ontology engineering is a field which studies the methods and methodologies for building ontologies, which encompasses a representation, formal naming and definition of the categories, properties and relations between the concepts, data and entities of a given domain of interest. In a broader sense, this field also includes a knowledge construction of the domain using formal ontology representations such as OWL/RDF. A large-scale representation of abstract concepts such as actions, time, physical objects and beliefs would be an example of ontological engineering. Ontology engineering is one of the areas of applied ontology, and can be seen as an application of philosophical ontology. Core ideas and objectives of ontology engineering are also central in conceptual modeling.
Ulrike M. Sattler is a professor of computer science in the information management group of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester and a visiting professor at the University of Oslo.
In the Semantic Web and in knowledge representation, a metaclass is a class whose instances can themselves be classes. Similar to their role in programming languages, metaclasses in Semantic Web languages can have properties otherwise applicable only to individuals, while retaining the same class's ability to be classified in a concept hierarchy. This enables knowledge about instances of those metaclasses to be inferred by semantic reasoners using statements made in the metaclass. Metaclasses thus enhance the expressivity of knowledge representations in a way that can be intuitive for users. While classes are suitable to represent a population of individuals, metaclasses can, as one of their feature, be used to represent the conceptual dimension of an ontology. Metaclasses are supported in the ontology language OWL and the data-modeling vocabulary RDFS.
Terry R. Payne is a computer scientist and artificial intelligence researcher at the University of Liverpool. He works on the use of ontologies by Software Agents within decentralised environments. He is best known for his work on Semantic Web Services and in particular for his work on OWL-S.
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