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<p class="banner"><a href="/2001/sw/" ><img src="/Icons/SW/sw-horz-w3c.png" width="241" height="48" alt="W3C SW Logo"/></a></p>

<h1>Web Ontology Language (OWL)</h1>

<p><img src="../../Icons/SW/Buttons/sw-owl-blue" width="80" height="15" alt='OWL Button'/> </p>

<div class="nav">
<p><strong>Contents:</strong> <a href="#specs">Specifications</a> | <a
href="#papers">Articles and Presentations</a> | <a href="#projects">Projects
and Applications</a> | <a href="#ontologies">Ontologies</a> |</p>
</div>

<div class="nav">
<p><strong>Nearby:</strong> <a href="/2000/01/sw/">Semantic Web Advanced
Development</a> | <a href="/2001/sw/interest/">SemWeb IG</a> | <a
href="http://www.w3.org/2003/08/owlfaq.html">OWL FAQ</a> | <a
href="/RDF/">RDF</a></p>
</div>

<p><strong>6 September 2007</strong>: W3C Launches the <a href="/2007/OWL/">OWL Working Group</a>.</p>

<p>A. OWL is a <em>Web</em> Ontology language. Where earlier languages have
been used to develop tools and ontologies for specific user communities
(particularly in the sciences and in company-specific e-commerce
applications), they were not defined to be compatible with the architecture
of the World Wide Web in general, and the Semantic Web in particular.</p>

<p>OWL uses both <a href="/Addressing/">URIs</a> for naming and the
description framework for the Web provided by <a href="/RDF/">RDF</a> to add
the following capabilities to ontologies:</p>
<ul>
  <li>Ability to be distributed across many systems</li>
  <li>Scalability to Web needs</li>
  <li>Compatibility with Web standards for accessibility and
    internationalization</li>
  <li>Openess and extensiblility</li>
</ul>

<p>OWL builds on RDF and RDF Schema and 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.</p>

<p>To participate in the development of the next versions of OWL,
consider joining the <a href="../../2007/OWL/">OWL Working Group</a>.</p>

<h2 id="specs">OWL Specification Development</h2>

<p>The OWL suite of specifications consist of:</p>
<ul>
  <li><cite><a href="/TR/owl-features/" class="title">OWL Web Ontology
    Language Overview</a></cite><br />
    W3C Recommendation <span class="date">10 Feb 2004</span>. Deborah L.
    McGuinness and Frank van Harmelen eds.
    <p>formerly <cite>Feature Synopsis for OWL Lite and OWL</cite></p>

    <blockquote>
      <p>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.</p>
    </blockquote>
  </li>
  <li><cite><a href="/TR/owl-guide/" class="title">OWL Web Ontology Language
    Guide</a></cite>
    <p>W3C Recommendation <span class="date">10 Feb 2004</span>. Smith,
    Welty, McGuinness, eds.</p>
  </li>
  <li><cite><a href="/TR/owl-ref/" class="title">OWL Web Ontology Language
    Reference</a></cite><br />

    <p>W3C Recommendation <span class="date">10 Feb 2004</span>, <span
    class="date">12 November 2002</span>. Dean, Schreiber, eds.</p>
  </li>
  <li><cite><a href="/TR/owl-semantics/" class="title">OWL Web Ontology
    Language Semantics and Abstract Syntax</a></cite>
    <p>W3C Recommendation <span class="date">10 Feb 2004</span>.
    Patel-Schneider, Hayes, Horrocks, eds.</p>
  </li>
  <li><a href="/TR/owl-test/" class="title"><cite>OWL Web Ontology Language
    Test Cases</cite></a><br />

    <p>W3C Recommendation <span class="date">10 Feb 2004</span>. Jeremy J.
    Carroll, Jos De Roo, eds.</p>
  </li>
  <li><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/webont-req/" class="title"><cite>OWL Web
    Ontology Language Use Cases and Requirements</cite></a><br />

    <p>W3C Recommendation <span class="date">10 Feb 2004</span>. Jeff Heflin,
    ed.</p>
  </li>
  <li><a class="title" href="http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-xmlsyntax/"><cite>OWL
    Web Ontology Language XML Presentation Syntax</cite></a> .
    <p>Masahiro Hori, Jérôme Euzenat, Peter F. Patel-Schneider. W3C
    Note 11 June 2003</p> 
  </li>
</ul>

<h2 id="tutorials">Tutorials</h2>

<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/Tutorials">A set of
tutorials on OWL and related Semantic Web technologies</a> is maintained by
the <a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/">Semantic Web Best
Practices and Deployment Working Group.</a></p>

<h2 id="papers">Articles and Presentations</h2>

<p>We do not currently keep a separate list of OWL presentations and
articles. See the <a href="/2001/sw/#events">Semantic Web presentations</a>,
<a href="/Press/Articles">W3C in The Press</a> and <a
href="http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/discovery/rdf/resources/#sec-press">Resource
Description Framework Press</a>.</p>

<h2 id="projects">Tools, Projects and Applications<a
id="paa" name="paa"></a></h2>

<p>The following is a small sample of the growing set of tools, projects and
applications utilizing OWL.</p>

<h3 id="demos">Demos / Portals</h3>
<ul>
  <li><a href="http://www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/about.html">AIFB SEmantic
    PortAL</a> - The Institute AIFB web site of the University of Karlsruhe
    provides annotated pages which contain dynamically generated machine
    processable content in form of OWL annotations.</li>
  <li>The <a href="http://www.aktors.org/akt/">AKT Portal</a> at the
    University of Southampton is largely based on ontologies, and is now
    using OWL.</li>
  <li>The University of Maryland Baltimore County (Finin) has developed two
    demos using OWL ( <a
    href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2003May/0083.html">Finin
    7May</a>)</li>
  <li><a href="http://www.biopax.org">BioPax</a> - A Data Exchange Format for
    Biological Pathways has been using OWL</li>
  <li>The <a href="/2002/01/tr-automation/">W3C tech reports</a> - related to
    the "multimedia collections" use case</li>
  <li>( <a href="http://www.mindswap.org">The MINDSWAP project web site</a>)
    uses OWL to generate all the web pages and "custom home pages" for
    members of the research group, as well as for doing photo markup. ( <a
    href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2003May/0054.html">Hendler
    6May</a>)</li>
  <li>The <a
    href="http://owl.mindswap.org/2003/arbitrary/class.shtml?class=http%3A%2F%2Fowl.mindswap.org%2F2003%2Font%2Fowlweb.rdf%23owlComment">OWL-generated
    Comment Status List</a> submitted for the CR request for OWL was
    generated by a combination of OWL tools.</li>
</ul>

<p style="font-weight:bold">The listing of developer’s tools on this page has been removed in July 2006, in favor of the <a href="http://esw.w3.org/topic/SemanticWebTools#preview">
more comprehensive page on the W3C Wiki</a>. By moving this list to the Wiki, the Semantic Web community at large can contribute
in keeping that information up-to-date.</p>

<!--
<h3>Commercial Ontology Support Tools</h3>
<ul>
  <li><a href="http://www.altova.com/products_semanticworks.html">Altova's
    SemanticWorks</a>

    <blockquote>
      Altova SemanticWorks 2006 is the ground-breaking visual RDF/OWL editor
      from the creators of XMLSpy. Visually design Semantic Web instance
      documents, vocabularies, and ontologies then output them in either
      RDF/XML or N-triples formats. SemanticWorks 2006 makes the job easy
      with tabs for instances, properties, classes, etc., context-sensitive
      entry helpers, and automatic format checking. It is the sensible way to
      put the Semantic Web to work for you.</blockquote>
  </li>
  <li><a href="http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/semanticstk">IODT</a>, IBM
    Integrated Ontology development toolkit, is a toolkit for ontology
    development. It includes ODM-based RDF/OWL programming APIs,
    Eclipse-based OWL editor and a high performance OWL repository.</li>
  <li><a href="http://www.networkinference.com">Network Inference</a> has
    developed a set of tools around their Cerebra Inference engine that allow
    for the development and use of OWL ontologies.</li>
  <li><a href="http://www.tucanatech.com/">Tucana Technologies Inc.</a> has
    developed a scaleable RDF triple store which includes some OWL
    inferencing and is adding more.</li>
</ul>



<h3 id="reasoners">Reasoners</h3>
<ul>
  <li><a href="http://kaon2.semanticweb.org/">KAON2</a> is a reasoner for OWL
    extended with the DL-safe subset of SWRL; it also provides an OWL
  API.</li>
  <li><a id="fact">FaCT</a> - a DL reasoner. see <a
    href="http://wonderweb.semanticweb.org/index.shtml">WonderWeb
    project</a>, <a
    href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2003Sep/0158.html">Bechhofer
    15 Sep</a>.</li>
  <li><a name="racer" id="racer">Racer</a> - a DL reasoner. see <a
    href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2003Sep/0128.html">Horrocks
    12Sep</a></li>
  <li>Cerebra from <a id="cerebra"
    href="http://www.NetworkInference.com">Network Inference</a> -
    <strong>owl syntax checker</strong>, nearly complete OWL DL <a
    href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2003Sep/0128.html">Horrocks
    12Sep</a></li>
  <li><a href="/2000/10/swap/doc/cwm.html">cwm</a> - useful but incomplete
    OWL Full</li>
  <li><a id="euler">Euler</a> - useful but incomplete OWL Full,see <a
    href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2003Jul/0112.html">De
    Roo 11 Jul</a>: 51 / 234 tests</li>
  <li><a id="surnia" href="http://www.w3.org/2003/08/surnia/">surnia</a> -
    OWL full reasoner based on otter. <a
    href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webont-comments/2003Aug/0015.html">Hawke
    26Aug</a></li>
  <li><a id="jena" href="http://www.hpl.hp.com/semweb/index.html">Jena/HP</a>
    ( <a
    href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2003May/0068.html">Reynolds/HP
    7 May</a>)will support OWL reasoning.</li>
  <li>Vampire <a
    href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2003Jul/0156.html">Horrocks
    17 Jul</a> - uses a first-order theorem prover to do OWL DL</li>
  <li><a id="pellet"
    href="http://www.mindswap.org/2003/pellet/index.shtml">Pellet</a> is a
    reasoner built in Java that was designed specifically for OWL reasoning.
    <a
    href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2003Sep/0165.html">Hendler/Sirin/Parsia
    15Sep</a>).</li>
  <li><a href="http://www.swi-prolog.org/packages/semweb.html">SWI-Prolog
    Semantic Web Library</a> contains <i>owl.pl</i> - an OWL reasoning
    package.</li>
  <li><a href="http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~hchen4/fowl">F-OWL</a> is an f-logic
    based Owl tool from UMBC.</li>
  <li><a href="http://mycampus.sadehlab.cs.cmu.edu/tests/">E-wallet</a> is an
    e-commerce and mobile computing tool based on a rule-based OWL
  reasoner.</li>
</ul>

<h3 id="parsers">Parsers / Validators</h3>
<ul>
  <li><a href="http://logic.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/dlpconvert/">dlpconvert</a>
    is a tool for the conversion of the Horn fragment of OWL (called DLP)
    from XML or RDF syntax to Prolog syntax.</li>
  <li><a name="owlv" href="http://phoebus.cs.man.ac.uk:9999/OWL/Validator"
    id="owlv">owl species validator/parser</a>. seems to be a conforming
    <strong>owl syntax checker</strong> per <a
    href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2003Sep/0090.html">Bechhofer
    10Sep</a></li>
  <li><a name="OWLP" id="OWLP">OWLP</a> seems to be a conforming <strong>owl
    syntax checker</strong>, per <a
    href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2003Sep/0176.html">Patel-Schneider
    16Sep</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://www.hpl.hp.com/semweb/index.html">Jena</a>: almost
    conforming ( <a
    href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2003May/0057.html">Carroll/HP
    6 May</a> )</li>
  <li><a href="http://owl.bbn.com/validator/">BBN OWL Validator</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://owl.mindswap.org/downloads">IC Instance Creator,
    ConvertToRDF, and SMORE</a> use an OWL parser developed at the University
    of Maryland MIND Laboratory.</li>
</ul>

<h3 id="editors">Editors</h3>
<ul>
  <li><a href="http://www.altova.com/products_semanticworks.html">Altova's
    SemanticWorks</a>

    <blockquote>
      Altova SemanticWorks 2006 is the ground-breaking visual RDF/OWL editor
      from the creators of XMLSpy. Visually design Semantic Web instance
      documents, vocabularies, and ontologies then output them in either
      RDF/XML or N-triples formats. SemanticWorks 2006 makes the job easy
      with tabs for instances, properties, classes, etc., context-sensitive
      entry helpers, and automatic format checking. It is the sensible way to
      put the Semantic Web to work for you.</blockquote>
  </li>
  <li><a href="http://www.topbraidcomposer.com/">Top Quandrant's TopBraid
    Composer</a>

    <blockquote>
      <p>TopBraid is a complete standards-based platform for developing,
      testing and maintaining Semantic Web applications. It offers a
      convenient drag-and-drop, form-based user interface with the ability to
      view and edit ontologies in a variety of serialization formats.
      Testing, consistency checking and debugging is supported by built-in
      OWL Inference engine, SPARQL query engine and Rules engine. TopBraid
      Composer makes it easier for an enterprises to move to Semantic Web
      standards by importing legacy models including XML Schemas, UML, RDB
      Schemas and spreadsheets. Open APIs are available, it can run with the
      database back-end for improve scaleability</p>
    </blockquote>
  </li>
  <li>The <a href="http://protege.stanford.edu/">Protege</a> has developed an
    <a href="http://protege.stanford.edu/plugins/owl/">OWL plugin</a>.</li>
  <li>Construct from <a href="http://www.NetworkInference.com">Network
    Inference</a> <strong>Complete OWL-DL</strong> (<a href="#cw15Jul">White
    15Jul</a>)</li>
  <li><a href="http://www.mindswap.org/~aditkal/editor.shtml">SMORE</a> is a
    markup tool that produces OWL documents</li>
  <li>cwm .n3 -&gt; .rdf produces conforming OWL Full documents</li>
</ul>

<h3 id="API">API</h3>
<ul>
  <li>OWL API ( <a
    href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2003May/0076.html">bechover/volz
    7 May</a>)</li>
  <li><a href="http://www.hpl.hp.com/semweb/index.html">Jena</a> ( <a
    href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2003May/0068.html">Reynolds/HP
    7 May</a>)</li>
  <li>Cerebra from <a href="http://www.NetworkInference.com">network
    inference</a></li>
</ul>
-->

<h2 id="ontologies">Ontologies</h2>
<ul>
  <li><a href="http://www.schemaweb.info/default.aspx">SchemaWeb</a> provides
    a comprehensive directory of RDF schemas and OWL ontologies to be browsed
    and searched by human agents and also an extensive set of web services to
    be used by agents and reasoning software applications that wish to obtain
    real-time schema information.</li>
  <li><a href="http://www.daml.org/ontologies/">DAML Ontology Library</a>
    which organizes hundreds of ontologies in a variety of different ways
    (keyword, organization, submission date, etc.)</li>
  <li><a href="http://swoogle.umbc.edu/">Swoogle</a> is a search engine for
    Semantic Web documents, including OWL ontologies, built by the University
    of Maryland Baltimore County under funding from the National Science
    Foundation.</li>
</ul>
<address class="footer">
  <a href="../People/Ivan/">Ivan Herman</a> &lt;ivan@w3.org&gt;, (W3C)
  Semantic Web Activity Lead<br/>
  $Revision: 1.36 $ of $Date: 2007/10/15 08:05:59 $
</address>
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