
116 Foundations of Semantic Web Technologies
There are two predefined classes, called owl:Thing and owl:Nothing. The
class owl:Thing is the most general class, and has every individual as an
instance. The class owl:Nothing has no instances by definition.
owl:Class is a subclass of rdfs:Class. There are some differences, how-
ever, which we will discuss in Section 4.2 on the different sublanguages of
OWL.
As in RDF, individuals can be declared to be instances of classes. This is
called class assignment.
<rdf:Description rdf:about="rudiStuder">
<rdf:type rdf:resource="Professor" />
</rdf:Description>
Equivalently, the following short form can be used.
<Professor ...