OWL

Members of the WonderWeb consortium have been active participants in the W3C WebOnt Working Group, contributing to the production of the OWL specification. We have also been working on implementations that support OWL.

OWL in RDF

For those interested in parsing OWL ontologies in RDF, a discussion of some of the issues may prove useful.

In addition, we have produced a collection of Rules of Thumb which can help to demonstrate what one needs to include in an XML/RDF rendering of an ontology in order to ensure that the ontology is in OWL DL or Lite. A version of this document also forms an Appendix to the OWL Language Reference document.

An API for OWL

The WonderWeb OLW API provides programmatic access to data structures representing OWL ontologies. A draft release of the API is now available. Please note that this is work in progress and should at best be considered alpha quality code. In the short term we are unlikely to be able to offer much in the way of support, although comments and suggestions are welcome. The code is available as an open source project to which we hope the community at large will contribute.

Source and binary distributions can be obtained from: http://sourceforge.net/projects/owlapi.

A simple OWL Species Validator has been developed using the API. This will check OWL-RDF documents for basic syntactic errors and will determine which particular sub-species of the language that the document belongs to.

OWL Implementation Experiences

A recent meeting of the OntoWeb Special interest Group SIG2 on Ontology Language Standards was devoted to a discussion of OWL Implementation experiences.