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W3C WebOnt working group

The Web Ontology working group (for short WebOnt) is one of the two working groups (along with RDF Core) that form the «Semantic Web Activity» of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Jérôme Euzenat and Jean-François Baget (from the EXMO team) are the INRIA representatives among 53 other members of WebOnt.

WebOnt's goal is to design an ontology language designed for the World Wide Web. The language proposed (named OWL - a somewhat disordered acronym of Web Ontology Language) is a description logics based language (in the continuity of DAML+OIL), build on top of the other language designed in W3C semantic web activity: RDF.

Using an XML syntax, this language allows the specification of classes and subclasses, properties and subproperties (as in RDFS), but extends these constructs to allow more complex relationships between entities including: means to limit the properties of classes with respect to number and type, means to infer that items with various properties are members of a particular class, a well-defined model of property inheritance, and similar semantic extensions to the base languages. As RDF/RDFS, OWL is grounded on formal set theoretic semantics.

The normative definition of the OWL Web Ontology Language 1.0 includes 6 documents:

• Overview gives a general view of the language (for deciding);
• Guide illustrates each concept of the language (for using);
• Reference presents in depth each language concept (for using);
• Semantics and abstract provides the formal semantics of the language (for developping tools);
• Test Cases provides numerous unit tests (for developping tools);
• Use cases and requirements presents use cases for which OWL has been designed (for deciding).

The elaboration of these documents is a collective work where members communicate along three different media:

• Participation in the WebOnt mailing lists
• A weekly audioconference
• A quarterly face to face meeting

Benefits for EXMO

For Exmo, the reason for joining WebOnt are:

• provide its expertise especially from knowledge representation (conceptual graphs, description logics, object representations) and XML;
• follow closely the evolution of formal languages for the semantic web;
• test some key concept of the Exmo project, directly in the semantic web infrastructure, through the implementation of a model-preserving transformation from OWL/XML presentation language to OWL/RDF exchange language.

Benefits for INRIA

INRIA benefits for a core competence on the OWL and RDF languages and can hope to better transfer results of its research activity to the public semantic web infrastructure.

INRIA is pleased to see the publication of OWL and RDF as W3C Recommendations. They will provide standard and stable grounds for our developments on searching Web resources - through the CORESE search engine - and on adapting knowledge sources - through the Transmorpher transformation engine and alignment tools. INRIA already takes advantage of available API for OWL and RDF, and expects these developments to boost the Semantic Web deployment.
-- Gérard Giraudon, Director for Development and Industrial Relations, INRIA (from the RDF/OWL release testimonials)

Reports for face-to-face meetings

• Manchester face to face meeting