From SHIQ and RDF to OWL: The Making of a Web Ontology Language Ian Horrocks,1 Peter F. Patel-Schneider,2 and Frank van Harmelen3 1 Department of Computer Science University of Manchester Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK Email:
[email protected] 2 Bell Labs Research Lucent Technologies 600 Mountain Avenue, Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974 U.S.A. Email:
[email protected] 3 AI Department Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam de Boelelaan 1081a, 1081HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands Email:
[email protected] Abstract. The OWL Web Ontology Language is a new formal language for representing ontologies in the Semantic Web. OWL has features from several families of representation languages, including primarily Descrip- tion Logics and frames. OWL also shares many characteristics with RDF, the W3C base of the Semantic Web. In this paper we discuss how the philosophy and features of OWL can be traced back to these older for- malisms, with modifications driven by several other constraints on OWL. Several interesting problems have arisen where these influences on OWL have clashed. Keywords: Ontologies, Semantic Web, Description Logics, Frames, RDF. 1 Introduction OWL [10] is a new ontology language for the Semantic Web, developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Ontology Working Group. OWL was primarily designed to represent information about categories of objects and how objects are interrelated—the sort of information that is often called an ontology. OWL can also represent information about the objects themselves—the sort of information that is often thought of as data. OWL was not designed in a vacuum.