W3C Web Ontology (WebOnt) WG is open from Dan Connolly on 2001-08-14 (www-rdf-logic@w3.org from August 2001) (original) (raw)

Following on our February plans...

[[[ The current international collaboration between DAML and OIL groups on a Web ontology layer is expected to become a part of this W3C Activity. ]]]

-- Semantic Web Activity Statement http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Activity

... we have created a new working group:

[[[

This Working Group, part of the Semantic Web Activity, will focus on the development of a language to extend the semantic reach of current XML and RDF meta-data efforts. In particular, in a recent talk on the Semantic Web, Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the W3C, outlined the necessary layers for developing applications that depend on an understanding of logical content, not just human-readable presentation. This working group will focus on building the ontological layer and the formal underpinnings thereof.

Such language layers are crucial to the emerging semantic web, as they allow the explicit representation of term vocabularies and the relationships between entities in these vocabularies. In this way, they go beyond XML, RDF and RDF-S in allowing greater machine readable content on the web. A further necessity is for such languages to be based on a clear semantics (denotational and/or axiomatic) to allow tool developers and language designers to unambiguously specify the expected meaning of the semantic content when rendered in the Web Ontology syntax.

Specifically, the Web Ontology Working Group is chartered to design the following component:

 A web ontology language, that builds on current web
 languges that allow the specification of classes and
 subclasses, properties and subproperties (such as RDFS),
 but which 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. 

 The March 2001 DAML+OIL specification, discussed in some
 detail in section 1.1 below serves as an example of an
 ontology langauge - a comparison of DAML+OIL to XML,
 XML-schema, and RDF-Schema is available.

Furthermore, the following general requirements must be met by the work produced by this Working Group:

 The products of the WebONT group should not presuppose
 any particular approach to either ontology design or
 ontology use. In addition, the language must support the
 development and linking of ontologies together, in a
 web-like manner. 
 The products of this working group must be supported by a
 formal semantics allowing language designers, tool builders,
 and other "experts" to be able to precisely understand the
 meaning and "legal" inferences for expressions in the
 language. 
 The language will use the XML syntax and datatypes
 whereever possible, and will be designed for maximum
 compatibility with XML and RDF language conventions.

The Working Group shall start by evaluating the technical solutions proposed in the DAML+OIL draft. If in this process the Working Group finds solutions that are agreed to be improvements over solutions suggested by DAML+OIL, those improved solutions should be used.

The Working Group will be chaired by Jim Hendler (Univ of Maryland) .

The remainder of this section describes the requirements and deliverables in more detail.

[...]

]]]

-- W3C Web Ontology Working Group Charter http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/WebOnt/charter Mon, 13 Aug 2001 22:47:25 GMT