Ontology Engineering - Ontology Languages

Ontology Languages

An ontology language is a formal language used to encode the ontology. There are a number of such languages for ontologies, both proprietary and standards-based:

• Common logic is ISO standard 24707, a specification for a family of ontology languages that can be accurately translated into each other.
• The Cyc project has its own ontology language called CycL, based on first-order predicate calculus with some higher-order extensions.
• The Gellish language includes rules for its own extension and thus integrates an ontology with an ontology language.
• IDEF5 is a software engineering method to develop and maintain usable, accurate, domain ontologies.
• KIF is a syntax for first-order logic that is based on S-expressions.
• Rule Interchange Format (RIF) and F-Logic combine ontologies and rules.
• OWL is a language for making ontological statements, developed as a follow-on from RDF and RDFS, as well as earlier ontology language projects including OIL, DAML and DAML+OIL. OWL is intended to be used over the World Wide Web, and all its elements (classes, properties and individuals) are defined as RDF resources, and identified by URIs.
• XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) is a syntax for expressing business semantics.