Semantic Web Activity News

The OWL Working Group recently held an extremely successful Face to Face meeting at which numerous outstanding issues were resolved, including the issue of what to call the extended version of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) that they are developing: it will be called OWL 2. It was felt that although the new language will be fully backwards compatible with the original OWL (modulo bug fixes and a possible change to annotation semantics), the new features and revisions to the specification warranted a change in major version number, and would also usefully distinguish a new standard from the OWL 1.1 Member Submission. The Working Group also decided to publish First Public Working Drafts of three more documents that will form part of the OWL 2 specification: XML Serialisation, Profiles and Primer. These provide, respectively, an XML syntax, a set of sub-languages that can be more simply and/or efficiently implemented, and an approachable introduction to OWL 2. The profiles document is particularly interesting as the defined sub-languages have some very attractive properties: one is a maximal subset for which polynomial time reasoning is still possible; one allows for implementation using relational database technology; and one allows for implementation using rule-based technologies.