RE: Taking advantage of OWL's standardization on a relationship vocabulary - need an OWL API?

> Another solution is to provide a standard OWL API.  The API has all the
> parsing smarts in it. Thus, this parsing code isn't written over and
> over.
>
> An example method in an OWL API might be:
>
>     isRelatedBy(term1URI, term2URI)
>       possible return values:
>           ---> "subClassOf"
>           ---> "equivalentProperty"
>           ---> "sameIndividualAs"
>           etc
>
> The bottom line is this:
>
> 1. I know how to define terms and their relationships using the standard
> OWL XML vocabulary.
> 2. I know how to create XML instance documents that employ the terms
> defined in 1.
> 3. It is not clear to me how to utilize 1 in processing 2.
> 4. Is a standard OWL API useful?
> 5. What other approaches are there to programmatically harvesting
> information from an OWL document?
> 6. What do you think?

OWL APIs are well on their way. Check out the material re. Wine Agent

http://onto.stanford.edu:8080/wino/index.jsp

and other RDF APIs, some of which include some of the kind of support you're
talking about - such as Jena:

http://www.hpl.hp.com/semweb/jena.htm

and Dave Beckett's big resource list always deserves a link:

http://www.ilrt.bristol.ac.uk/discovery/rdf/resources/

Cheers,
Danny.