Semantic Web Technologies

OWL Web Ontology Language

What is it?

A family of languages.

OWL has three increasingly-expressive sublanguages: OWL Lite, OWL DL, and OWL Full. OWL Web Ontology Language Overview

OWL adds more vocabulary for describing properties and classes: among others, relations between classes (e.g. disjointness), cardinality (e.g. "exactly one"), equality, richer typing of properties, characteristics of properties (e.g. symmetry), and enumerated classes. OWL Web Ontology Language Overview

OWL Full can be viewed as an extension of RDF, while OWL Lite and OWL DL can be viewed as extensions of a restricted view of RDF. OWL Web Ontology Language Overview

Purpose

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 Web Ontology Language Overview