
Chapter 4
Ontologies in OWL
In this chapter, we introduce the ontology language OWL. We focus on an
introduction to the syntax and on conveying an intuitive understanding of the
semantics. We will also discuss the forthcoming OWL 2 standard. A formal
treatment of the semantics will be done later in Chapter 5, and a discussion
of OWL software tools can be found in Section 8.5.
We have seen at the end of Ch apter 3 that RDF(S) is suitable for modeling
simple ontologies and allows the derivation of implicit knowledge. But we
have also seen that RDF(S) provides only very limited expressive means and
that it is not possible to represent more complex knowledge. ...