web ontology language (OWL)

Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a formal Web ontology language for exchanging ontologies on the World Wide Web(WWW). This means formalizations of knowledge domains and conceptual systems.

The OWL language consists of classes, attributes and associations, and places these in hierarchical relationships to each other. Whereby the attributes and associations are summarized and called characteristics of a class. OWL offers possibilities around classes and everything to them to define exactly and around concepts of a domain and their relations to describe formally. OWL can be used to perform certain logical and mathematical operations and to define extensional or restrictive statements such as at most or at least.

The Web Ontology Language was specified by the World Wide Web Consortium(W3C) and is one of the markup languages that establish relationships among information on the semantic Web. The Resource Description Framework( RDF) serves as the exchange syntax.