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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / SEPTEMBER 1, 2003; VOL. 2 NO. 35
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Breaking News -
General:
W3C Seeks More Implementations Of
Web Ontology Language
The World Wibe Web Consortium (W3C) issued "OWL," a Web Ontology Language,
as
a W3C Candidate for Recommendation because the group seeks more
implementations of the language.
OWL, a language for defining structured Web-based ontologies, enables
richer
integration and interoperability of data across application boundaries,
according to W3C. Implementations of OWL already exist.
Corporate enterprise, governments, medical communities and bioinformatics
are
among the early adopters of OWL. W3C says that OWL enables applications like
Web portal management, multimedia collections that cannot respond to English
language-based search tools, Web services and ubiquitous computing.
"Essentially, an ontology is the definition of a set of terms and how they
relate to each other for a particular domain and that can be used on the Web
in a number of different ways," said Jim Hendler, co-chairman of the W3C Web
Ontology Working Group, which released OWL.
OWL pertains to the concept of the Semantic Web, which uses XML and RDF to
link content, Hendler said. Following the call for implementations stage, W3C
will review and vote on OWL. It could be finalized by the fourth quarter of
this year, according to a W3C representative.
While earlier languages have been used to develop tools and ontologies for
specific user communities such as sciences, they were not compatible with the
architecture of the World Wide Web in general, in particular the Semantic Web,
said W3C. OWL uses both URLs for naming and the linking provided by RDF
(Resource Description Framework) to add the following capabilities to
ontologies: distributable across many systems; scalable for the Web;
compatible with Web standards for accessibility and internationalization; and
open and extensible.
OWL builds on RDF Model and Schema and adds vocabularies for describing
properties and classes.
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