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Written by OWL Code
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  A number of research efforts during the mid to late 1990s explored how the idea of knowledge representation (KR) from AI could be made useful on the World Wide Web. These included languages based on HTML (called SHOE), XML (called XOL, later OIL), and various frame-based KR languages and knowledge acquisition approaches.
OWL DL is based in part on the description logic >\mathcal{SHOIN} (D) and also on a number of earlier KR systems known as frame-based systems. Its subset OWL Lite is based on the less expressive logic >\mathcal{SHIF} (D). All reasoning tasks in both OWL DL and OWL Lite can be reduced to knowledge based (KB) satisfiability. OWL Full operates outside the bounds of description logic, allowing more power and expressivity and having fewer constraints on use, but at the cost of decidability. (OWL Full's semantics is based on the semantics of RDF.) OWL is encoded in RDF/XML documents.
The OWL Language is a research-based revision of the DAML+OIL web ontology language. DAML+OIL was developed by a group called the "US/UK ad hoc Joint Working Group on Agent Markup Languages" which was jointly funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under the DAML program and the EU's IST funding project.
The World Wide Web Consortium created the "Web Ontology Working Group" which began work on November 1, 2001 chaired by James Hendler and Guus Shreiber. The first working drafts of the abstract syntax, reference and synopsis were published in July 2002. The OWL documents became a formal W3C recommendation on February 10, 2004 and the working group was disbanded on May 31, 2004.
Within the working group, effort to identify design goals and requirements was led by Jeff Heflin. Some of the requirements were contributed by Deborah McGuinness based upon over a decade of work in building ontology-based systems. Other requirements were identified as part of Heflin's Ph.D. thesis work in building a prototype Semantic Web system. The other members of the working group contributed over 25 use cases, which were later boiled down into defining a set of use cases. (For example, a draft version of the Corporate Web Site Management section was written by Michael Smith, a use case on agent-based computing was developed by Tim Finin, etc.). |
