From Semantic Web Standards

Publication date: 2009-10-27 (with a previous version published at: 2004-02-10) Created by: OWL Working Group List of documents at: http://www.w3.org/standards/techs/owl

Web Ontology Language (OWL)

Overview

The W3C Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a Semantic Web language designed to represent rich and complex knowledge about things, groups of things, and relations between things. OWL is a computational logic-based language such that knowledge expressed in OWL can be reasoned with by computer programs either to verify the consistency of that knowledge or to make implicit knowledge explicit. OWL documents, known as ontologies, can be published in the World Wide Web and may refer to or be referred from other OWL ontologies. OWL is part of the W3C’s Semantic Web technology stack, which includes RDF, RDFS, SPARQL, etc.

The current version of OWL, also referred to as “OWL 2”, was published in 2009. OWL 2 is an extension and revision of the 2004 version of OWL developed by the [W3C Web Ontology Working Group] (now closed) and published in 2004. A separate document, called OWL 2 Overview gives a better overview of the language and its relationships to the 2004 version of OWL.

Recommended Reading

The official OWL documents, published in 2009, include a OWL 2 Primer. The OWL 2 Overview also provides a good entry point to the various documents, their mutual relationships and roles that constitute OWL 2. The OWL Working Group itself is now inactive.

A number of textbooks have been published on OWL, and on Semantic Web in general. Please, refer to a separate page listing some of those, as maintained by the community. That list also includes references to conference proceedings and article collections that might be of general interest.

Tools that are listed as relevant to OWL

(Note that you can browse tools per tool categories or programming languages, too.)

Last modified and/or added

The description of the following tools have been added and/or modified most recently.

• The SPARQL2XQuery Framework (last modified: 29 December 2011)
• The SPARQL-RW Framework (last modified: 29 December 2011)
• ELMAR-to-GoodRelations (last modified: 4 November 2011)
• PCS2OWL (last modified: 4 November 2011)
• Google Product Feed Converter (last modified: 4 November 2011)

All relevant tools

This is a list of all tools listed on this wiki, and that are marked as relevant to OWL.

• OWL verbalizer in ACE (development environment).
• AllegroGraph RDF Store (triple store, programming environment, reasoner, development environment, rdfs reasoner). Directly usable from Java, LISP, Python, Prolog, C, Ruby, Perl
• Anzo Suite (development environment, programming environment, visualizer, converter). Directly usable from Javascript, Java, .Net
• BaseVISor (reasoner, programming environment, rule reasoner, owl reasoner). Directly usable from Java
• Bigdata® (triple store, reasoner, rdfs reasoner, owl reasoner).
• Bossam (reasoner, programming environment, owl reasoner). Directly usable from Java
• CEX (modularization and diffing).
• CMap COE (development environment, editor).
• ClioPatria (triple store, programming environment, reasoner, rule reasoner). Directly usable from Prolog, C
• Closed World Machine (CWM) (programming environment, rule reasoner, owl reasoner, command line tool). Directly usable from Python
• Description Logic Complexity Navigator (development environment).
• DOME (development environment).
• dlpconvert (converter). Directly usable from Prolog
• ELK (reasoner, programming environment, owl reasoner). Directly usable from Java
• ELMAR-to-GoodRelations (converter, rdf generator).
• Euler (triple store). Directly usable from Java, C-sharp, Python, Javascript, Prolog
• Eyeball (validator).
• FaCT++ (reasoner, programming environment, owl reasoner). Directly usable from C++
• FuXi (programming environment). Directly usable from Python
• GeoSPARQL (programming environment). Directly usable from Java
• GoodRelations Validator (validator).
• Google Product Feed Converter (converter, rdf generator).
• HermiT (reasoner, programming environment, owl reasoner). Directly usable from Java
• IBM’s Web Ontology Manager (development environment).
• Pellet Integrity Constraints (validator).
• … further results