Seven OWL 2 Drafts Published

Posted on October 10, 2008 by Ivan Herman

The W3C OWL Working Group published seven documents related to the OWL 2 Web Ontology Language. OWL 2 extends OWL adding new features that users have requested and that software providers are prepared to implement. The documents are:

  1. Structural Specification and Functional-Style Syntax
  2. Direct Semantics
  3. RDF-Based Semantics (First Public Draft)
  4. Mapping to RDF Graphs
  5. XML Serialization
  6. Profiles
  7. Conformance and Test Cases (First Public Draft)

The first three documents form the technical core of OWL 2, which has both a traditional “direct” semantics (for OWL DL) and a new “RDF-based” semantics (for OWL Full). Documents 4 and 5 specify two different serializations for OWL ontologies, one based on RDF and one using XML more directly. Document 6 defines useful subsets of OWL which may be easier to implement or may better meet certain performance requirements. Finally, document 7 specifies conformance and will later enumerate the OWL 2 test cases. Five other documents are under development; but they are not yet ready for public review.

About Ivan Herman

Ivan Herman is the Semantic Web Activity Lead at W3C. He graduated as a mathematician at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, Hungary, in 1979. After a brief scholarship at the Université Paris VI he joined the Hungarian research institute in computer science (SZTAKI) where he worked for 6 years. He left Hungary in 1986 and, after a few years in industry, he joined the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Sciences (CWI) in Amsterdam where he has held a tenure position since 1988. He received a PhD degree in Computer Science in 1990 at the Leiden University, in the Netherlands. Ivan joined the W3C team as Head of Offices in January 2001 while maintaining his position at CWI. He served as Head of Offices until June 2006, when he was asked to take the Semantic Web Activity Lead position.

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