From SHIQ and RDF to OWL:
The Making of a Web Ontology Language

Ian Horrocks
Peter F. Patel-Schneider
Frank van Harmelen

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 Description 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 formalisms, with modications driven by several other constraints on OWL. Several interesting problems have arisen where these in uences on OWL have clashed.

(PDF paper, 236Kb)

@Article{,
  author = 	 "Ian Horrocks and Peter F. Patel-Schneider and 
                  Frank van Harmelen",
  title = 	 "From {SHIQ} and {RDF} to {OWL}:
                  The Making of a Web Ontology Language",
  journal = 	 "Journal of Web Semantics",
  year = 	 2003,
  volume =	 1,
  number =	 1,
  pages  =       "7-26",
}

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