Abstract—The foundation of the semantic web lies firmly on a strong foundation of Web Ontology Language(OWL). OWL was developed by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Ontology Working Group and has features from several families of representation languages. OWL also shares many characteristics with RDF, the W3C base of the Semantic Web. This paper will discuss how the “thought process” behind OWL can be connected to its older formalisms, with modifications due to the functionalities that OWL had to give. A smooth move from RDF to OWL is made possible by handling every possible situation of RDF in OWL. Also various species of OWL are discussed with their features and restrictions. The recent development in ontology engineering and the immense tool support for OWL is a conformance of its acceptability.

Index Terms—ontologies, semantic web, description logics, frames, RDF  

Cite: Farheen Siddiqui and M. Afshar Alam, "Web Ontology Language Design and Related Tools: A Survey," Journal of Emerging Technologies in Web Intelligence, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 47-59, February 2011. doi:10.4304/jetwi.3.1.47-59