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Building the Ontology Layer of the Web

Peter F. Patel-Schneider, Bell Labs Research, pfps@research.bell-labs.com

The Web ontology language must be able to describe and organize knowledge in the Web. Fine words, but what do they mean? Well, starting from the back (a very good place to start), the Web ontology language is part of the World-Wide Web, not just the semantic web [1].  The Web ontology language should be able to describe and organize knowledge expressed in XML, ``the universal format for structured documents and data on the Web'' (http://www.w3.org/XML/), not just knowledge expressed in Semantic Web languages, such as RDF and "RDFS".

Unfortunately, this first requirement is already problematic, as there is a gulf between XML and RDF [3].  Will the Web ontology language work with knowledge expressed in XML, and bypass RDF, or will it work with knowledge expressed in RDF, and ignore XML?  As there is vastly more knowledge expressed in XML than in RDF, the answer to this should be easy - work with XML and bypass RDF.

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related links

1. Tim Berners-Lee, James Handler, and Ora Lassila. 
2. Dieter Fensel, Ian Horrocks, Frank van Harmelen, Deborah L. McGuinness,    and Peter F. Patel-Schneider.  OIL: Ontology Infrastructure to Enable the Semantic Web.  IEEE Intelligent Systems, 16 (2), 2001.
3. Peter Patel-Schneider and Jerome Simeon.  The Yin/Yang Web: XML Syntax and RDF Semantics.  WWW11, Hololulu, Hawaii, USA, May 2002.

• OWL : Web Ontology Language
• Ontology : formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization