The Web Ontology Language, known as OWL, was approved by the World Wide Web consortium and now joins Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Extensible Markup Language (XML) as standards for publishing data online. OWL is based largely on a language developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to lend structure to the vast amounts of data that exist on the Web and in legacy applications. DARPA considers the new language a significant step toward building a so-called semantic Web that is broken down by discrete, interrelated pieces of data.
According to a DARPA statement: “The standardization of OWL by the World Wide Web Consortium allows semantic Web technology to move out of the research and development community and into broad-based, commercial-grade platforms for building highly distributed, Web-enabled, cross-enterprise applications.”
OWL employs networks of hyperlinked ontologies to represent data relationships. Ontologies consist of the vocabularies that describe areas of knowledge. Using linked ontologies, new Web services can more easily integrate data that resides on separate, legacy systems.
DARPA expects OWL-based applications will help intelligence, law enforcement and military users find relationships in today’s unstructured data, which will improve analysis and planning.
Other government agencies may use OWL as part of e-Government initiatives to build better search tools for their constituents.
Quelle: Washington Technology, 16.02.2004
