OWL Web Ontology Language Use Cases and Requirements

OWL Web Ontology Language Use Cases and Requirements: "The Semantic Web is a vision for the future of the Web in which information is given explicit meaning, making it easier for machines to automatically process and integrate information available on the Web. The Semantic Web will build on XML's ability to define customized tagging schemes [XML] and RDF's flexible approach to representing data [RDF Concepts]. The next element required for the Semantic Web is a web ontology language which can formally describe the semantics of classes and properties used in web documents. In order for machines to perform useful reasoning tasks on these documents, the language must go beyond the basic semantics of RDF Schema [RDF Vocabulary].

This document is one part of the specification of OWL, the Web Ontology Language. The Document Roadmap section of the OWL Overview document describes each of the other documents. This document enumerates the requirements of a web ontology language as perceived by the working group. However, it is expected that future languages will extend OWL, adding, among other things, greater logical capabilities and the ability to establish trust on the Semantic Web."

We motivate the need for a web ontology language by describing six use cases. Some of these use cases are based on efforts currently underway in industry and academia, others demonstrate more long-term possibilities. The use cases are followed by design goals that describe high-level objectives and guidelines for the development of the language. These design goals will be considered when evaluating proposed features. The section on Requirements presents a set of features that should be in the language and gives motivations for those features. The Objectives section describes a list of features that might be useful for many use cases but may not necessarily be addressed by the working group.