Journal of Computing, Volume 2, Issue 6, June 2010, ISSN 2151-9617 HTTPS://SITES.GOOGLE.COM/SITE/JOURNALOFCOMPUTING/ WWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.ORG 166 The State of the Art: Ontology Web- Based Languages: XML Based Mohammad Mustafa Taye Department of Software Engineering Faculty of Information Technology Philadelphia University, Amman, Jordan Abstract — Many formal languages have been proposed to express or represent Ontologies, including RDF, RDFS, DAML+OIL and OWL. Most of these languages are based on XML syntax, but with various terminologies and expressiveness. Therefore, choosing a language for building an Ontology is the main step. The main point of choosing language to represent Ontology is based mainly on what the Ontology will represent or be used for. That language should have a range of quality support features such as ease of use, expressive power, compatibility, sharing and versioning, internationalisation. This is because different kinds of knowledge-based applications need different language features. The main objective of these languages is to add semantics to the existing information on the web. The aims of this paper is to provide a good knowledge of existing language and understanding of these languages and how could be used. Index Terms — Ontology, Ontology language, RDF, RDFS, DAML+OIL , OWL 1 INTRODUCTION Ontologies become a critical part in many languages provide richer constructors for areas, especially in Web Semantics. forming complex class expressions and axioms. Consequently, a number of representational In fact, recently most Ontology developers formats have been proposed to support and have used Ontology Editors, which are express them completely. environments or tools used directly for editing, Current languages used to express developing or modifying Ontologies. These tools Ontologies fall generally into three categories [1]: are used for providing support for the vocabularies of Ontology defined using natural Ontological development process, as well as for language, frame-based languages used to build conceptualising the Ontology; they transform the the structure of Ontologies based on explicit conceptualisation into executable code using statements of class and slot, and those languages translators. So the output Ontology of these tools based on logic, such as Description Logics. will be in one of the Web Ontology languages The main object of semantic web languages supported by editors Such as Protégé [18], OWL- is to add semantics to the existing information on P [21] and OilEd [22]. Alternatively Ontology the Web. RDF/RDFS [7], OIL [14], DAML+OIL reasoners are used to check the conflicts with a [9], and OWL [2] are modelling web languages high degree of automation. Many such systems, that have already been developed to represent or including RACER [19] and FaCT [20], have been express Ontologies. In general, most of these developed recently. languages are based on XML [16] syntax, but Returning to the main concern of this section, they have different terminologies and modelling web languages, there are in general expressions. Indeed, some of these languages two different types of language: Presentation have the ability to represent some logical relation languages such as HTML, designed to represent but others do not. Because some languages have text and images to users or requesters without greater expressive power than others, languages reference to the content, and Data Languages, chosen for representing Ontologies are based intended to be processed by machines. The mainly on what the Ontology represents or what present research relates to the latter. it will be used for. In other words, different kinds Before OWL, much research has been of Ontological knowledge-based applications conducted into creating a powerful Ontology need different language facilitators for enabling modelling language. This research stream began reasoning on Ontology data. These description with the XML-based RDF and RDF/S, Journal of Computing, Volume 2, Issue 6, June 2010, ISSN 2151-9617 HTTPS://SITES.GOOGLE.COM/SITE/JOURNALOFCOMPUTING/ WWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.ORG 167 progressed to the Ontology Inference Layer metadata about the resources on the web, is (OIL), and continued with the creation of capable of representing data on and exchanging DAML+OIL, the result of joining the American knowledge over the Web. It was developed to be proposal DAML-ONT5 with the European understood by computers, facilitating language OIL. All these languages are XML or interoperability between applications. In other RDF syntax based, and are consequently words, it is a framework for using and compatible with web standards. Indeed, RDF representing metadata and describing the and OWL make searching for and reusing semantics of information about web resources in information both more reliable and easier, a way accessible to machines. because they are considered as standards that RDF is recommended by the World Wide Web enable the Web to be a global infrastructure for Consortium (W3C). Uniform Resource Identifiers sharing documents and data equally. (URIs) are the method used by RDF to identify As mentioned in [2], some important resources or thing. In fact, it is based built upon requirements for quality support should be taken XML, but while that is designed for syntax, RDF into account when developing languages for is intended for semantics. encoding Ontologies. These include giving the As has been mentioned, RDF is a framework user explicit written format, ease of use, for describing web resources, which is why it has expressive power, compatibility, sharing and become a common method of describing the versioning, internationalisation, formal properties, time, information and content of web conceptualisations of domains models, well resources, so that it can be read and understood defined syntax and semantics, efficient reasoning by computer applications. support, sufficient expressive power, and RDF can be used in several applications, one convenience of expression. of the most important being resource discovery, Syntax is one of the most important features used to enhance search engine capabilities. It is in any language, so it should be well-defined, it also used to facilitate knowledge sharing and is also the most significant condition required for exchange in intelligent software agents so-called the processing of information by machine. Ontology, and, previously mentioned, to The semantics of knowledge should be well describe the content and content relationships defined because it represents the meaning of that available with any resource such as a page. knowledge. Formal semantics should be The RDF model has three elements: a resource established in the domain of mathematical logic (the subject), the object and the predicate. We can in, clearly defined way that will lead to say that <subject> has a property <predicate> unambiguous meaning. Well-defined semantics valued by <object>. will lead to correct reasoning. Semantics can be For example, a triplet could be "H.ZEDAN is considered as pre- requisites that help to support the Head of the STRL Group". In an RDF graph, reasoning. On the other hand, reasoning will all triplets "nodes and arcs" should be labelled help to check and discover consistent Ontology, with qualified URIs. In this example, it could be to verify unintended relationships between said that the Subject (Resource) is the STRL classes, and to classify individuals into classes. Group, the predicate (property) is Head of, and This paper has detailed the most common and the Object (literally) is H.ZEDAN. important languages such as RDF, RDF/S, DAML+OIL, OWL, all of which are based on 2.1 RESOURCE DESCRIPTION FRAMEWORK CHEMA XML. (RDF) S Extensible Markup Language (XML) [16] is The Resource Description Framework / widely known in the WWW community because Schema (RDFS) [6, 7] has been built upon the it is a flexible text format and was designed to XML and RDF models and upon syntax. RDFS describe data and to meet the challenges of large- provides additional facilities to support scale e-business and electronic publishing, and it evolution in both of the individual RDF plays an important role in exchanging different vocabularies, and the core RDF Schema type of data on the Web. In fact, it is the basis for vocabulary. a rapidly growing number of software The RDF Schema provides a machine- development activities. understandable system for defining the The present research, for the sake of vocabularies needed for such applications or simplicity, deals with RDF and RDFS as one descriptive vocabularies. In other words, the description language. RDF Schema is a collection of RDF resources that can be used to define or describe properties of 2 RESOURCE DESCRIPTION FRAMEWORK other RDF resources which define application- (RDF) specific RDF vocabularies. At the same time, Resource Description Framework (RDF) [3, 4, RDF(S) helps developers to describe classes and and 5] a language used to provide a standard for properties in a specific way and to specify Journal of Computing, Volume 2, Issue 6, June 2010, ISSN 2151-9617 HTTPS://SITES.GOOGLE.COM/SITE/JOURNALOFCOMPUTING/ WWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.ORG 168 relationships between those properties and resource, a property, and property value forms, classes, and it allows combinations between as in the statement: "The University of classes, properties, or values. In other words, Http://www.dmu.ac.uk/RDF is De Montfort". RDFS is used to define RDF vocabularies. The subject of the statement above is http:// In general, RDFS is defined in a namespace www.dmu.ac.uk /RDF. informally called 'rdfs', and identified by the URI The predicate is university. reference http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf- The object is De Montfort. schema#. On the other hand, RDF is defined in a Statement: "The location of namespace informally called ‘rdf’, and identified http://www.dmu.ac.uk/RDF is UK-Leicester". by the URI reference The subject of the statement above is: http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax- http://www.dmu.ac.uk/RDF. ns#. The predicate is: location. The object is: UK-Leicester.