Web Ontology Language - Syntax - High Level - OWL Abstract Syntax

OWL Abstract Syntax

This high level syntax is used to specify the OWL ontology structure and semantics.

The OWL abstract syntax presents an ontology as a sequence of annotations, axioms and facts. Annotations carry machine and human oriented meta-data. Information about the classes, properties and individuals that compose the ontology is contained in axioms and facts only. Each class, property and individual is either anonymous or identified by an URI reference. Facts state data either about an individual or about a pair of individual identifiers (that the objects identified are distinct or the same). Axioms specify the characteristics of classes and properties. This style is similar to frame languages, and quite dissimilar to well known syntaxes for description logics (DLs) and Resource Description Framework (RDF).

Sean Bechhofer, et al. argue that though this syntax is hard to parse, it is quite concrete. They conclude that the name abstract syntax may be somewhat misleading.

Read more about this topic:  Web Ontology Language, Syntax, High Level

Famous quotes containing the words owl and/or abstract:

    The little owl flew through the night,
    As if the people in the air
    Were frightened and he frightened them,
    By being there....
    Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

    Rights! There are no rights whatever without corresponding duties. Look at the history of the growth of our constitution, and you will see that our ancestors never upon any occasion stated, as a ground for claiming any of their privileges, an abstract right inherent in themselves; you will nowhere in our parliamentary records find the miserable sophism of the Rights of Man.
    Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)