OWL 2 Profiles

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Markus Krötzsch

OWL 2 Profiles: An Introduction to Lightweight Ontology Languages



Abstract. This chapter gives an extended introduction to the lightweight profiles OWL EL, OWL QL, and OWL RL of the Web Ontology Language OWL. The three ontology language standards are sublanguages of OWL DL that are restricted in ways that significantly simplify ontological reasoning. Compared to OWL DL as a whole, reasoning algorithms for the OWL profiles show higher performance, are easier to implement, and can scale to larger amounts of data. Since ontological reasoning is of great importance for designing and deploying OWL ontologies, the profiles are highly attractive for many applications. These advantages come at a price: various modelling features of OWL are not available in all or some of the OWL profiles. Moreover, the profiles are mutually incomparable in the sense that each of them offers a combination of features that is available in none of the others. This chapter provides an overview of these differences and explains why some of them are essential to retain the desired properties. To this end, we recall the relationship between OWL and description logics (DLs), and show how each of the profiles is typically treated in reasoning algorithms.

Published at Reasoning Web 2012 (Book chapter)

Download PDF (last update: Jun 13 2012)

Citation details

  • Markus Krötzsch. OWL 2 Profiles: An Introduction to Lightweight Ontology Languages. In Thomas Eiter, Thomas Krennwallner, eds.: Reasoning Web Summer School 2012, pp. 112–183. SpringerProperty "Publisher" has a restricted application area and cannot be used as annotation property by a user. 2012.

Remarks

These are the lecture notes for a course at the 8th Reasoning Web Summer School in Vienna, Austria, September 3–8 2012, which is part of the Vienna Logic Weeks 2012. The notes have been published in Springer LNCS 7487.

See also the slides for this lecture (feel free to re-use, but please link to this page).

A slightly extended version of the slides was used at the KESW Summer School 2012 in St. Petersburg.

A further extended version of the slides was presented at a slightly longer course at the ICCL Summer School 2013 in Dresden.

Topics

Semantic Web, Description logics