News Release: World Wide Web Consortium Issues RDF and OWL as W3C Recommendations

W3C does not usually send out such long releases, but today's news is
significant. RDF and OWL, two Semantic Web technologies under
development at W3C have been approved as Recommendations today.

The deployment of these standards in commercial products and services
signals the transition of Semantic Web technology from what was largely
a research and advanced development project over the last five years, to
more practical technology deployed in mass market tools that enables
more flexible access to structured data on the Web. As Tim Berners-Lee
explains, "It's not unlike the early days of the Web, when once people
saw how it worked, they understood its power. We're entering that phase
now, where people can see the beginnings of the Semantic Web at work, at
the enterprise level."

For more information, including follow-up contacts from many of the 24
testimonial providers, please contact Janet Daly, W3C Head of
Communications, at +1 617 253 5884 <janet@w3.org>, or refer to the
contact in your region, listed at the end of this email.

================================================

World Wide Web Consortium Issues RDF and OWL Recommendations

Semantic Web emerges as commercial-grade infrastructure for sharing data
on the Web

Web Resources

This press release
   In English: http://www.w3.org/2004/01/sws-pressrelease.html.en
   In French: http://www.w3.org/2004/01/sws-pressrelease.html.fr
   In Japanese: http://www.w3.org/2004/01/sws-pressrelease.html.ja

24 Testimonials in support of the RDF and OWL announcement, including
Adobe Systems; Aduna BV; Agfa-Gevaert N. V.; Boeing; Brandsoft, Inc.;
Institute for Learning and Research Technology, University of Bristol;
  Creative Commons; DARPA; Fujitsu; HP; IBM; INRIA; Maryland Information
and Network Dynamics (MIND) Laboratory; University of Maryland (UBMC);
McDonald Bradley, Inc. (MBI); Mondeca; Mozilla Foundation; Network
Inference, Ltd.; Nokia; Profium; Semaview, Inc.; University of
Southampton; Sun Microsystems, Inc.; and TopQuadrant:
 http://www.w3.org/2004/01/sws-testimonial.html




http://www.w3.org/ -- 10 February 2004 -- Today, the World Wide Web
Consortium announced final approval of two key Semantic Web
technologies, the revised Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the
Web Ontology Language (OWL). RDF and OWL are Semantic Web standards that
provide a framework for asset management, enterprise integration and the
sharing and reuse of data on the Web. These standard formats for data
sharing span application, enterprise, and community boundaries - all of
these different types of "user" can share the same information, even if
they don't share the same software.

Today's announcement marks the emergence of the Semantic Web as a
broad-based, commercial-grade platform for data on the Web. The
deployment of these standards in commercial products and services
signals the transition of Semantic Web technology from what was largely
a research and advanced development project over the last five years, to
more practical technology deployed in mass market tools that enables
more flexible access to structured data on the Web. Testimonials from
enterprise-scale implementors and independent developers illustrate
current uses of these standards on the Web today.

"RDF and OWL make a strong foundation for Semantic Web applications,"
said Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web.
"Their approval as W3C Recommendations come at a time when new products
spring up in areas as diverse as Enterprise Integration and medical
decision support. It's not unlike the early days of the Web, when once
people saw how it worked, they understood its power. We're entering that
phase now, where people can see the beginnings of the Semantic Web at work."

A World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Recommendation is understood by
industry and the Web community at large as a Web standard. Each
Recommendation is a stable specification developed by a W3C Working
Group and reviewed by the W3C Membership. Recommendations promote
interoperability of Web technologies of the Web by explicitly conveying
the industry consensus formed by the Working Group.

Wide Range of Applications Growing from New Semantic Web Standards

Semantic Web-enabled software using RDF and OWL include:

     * Content creation applications: Authors can connect metadata
(subject, creator, location, language, copyright status, or any other
terms) with documents, making the new enhanced documents searchable
     * Tools for Web site management: Large Web sites can be managed
dynamically according to content categories customized for the site managers
     * Software that takes advantage of both RDF and OWL: Organizations
can integrate enterprise applications, publishing and subscriptions
using flexible models
     * Cross-application data reuse: RDF and OWL formats are standard,
not proprietary, allowing data reuse from diverse sources

Many specific examples of commercial applications and enterprise scale
implementations of these technologies are detailed in both the
testimonial page, and the RDF Implementations and OWL Implementations pages.

How the Semantic Web Pieces Fit Together - XML, RDF and OWL

Much has been written about the Semantic Web, as if it is a replacement
technology for the Web we know today. "In reality," countered Eric
Miller, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead, "it's more Web Evolution than
Revolution. The Semantic Web is made through incremental changes, by
bringing machine-readable descriptions to the data and documents already
on the Web. XML, RDF and OWL enable the Web to be a global
infrastructure for sharing both documents and data, which make searching
and reusing information easier and more reliable as well. "

W3C's Semantic Web Activity builds on work done in other W3C Activities,
such as the XML Activity. Its focus is to develop standard technologies,
on top of XML, that support the growth of the Semantic Web.

XML Provides Rules, Syntax for Structured Documents

At the foundation, XML provides a set of rules for creating vocabularies
that can bring structure to both documents and data on the Web. XML
gives clear rules for syntax; XML Schemas then serve as a method for
composing XML vocabularies. XML is a powerful, flexible surface syntax
for structured documents, but imposes no semantic constraints on the
meaning of these documents.

RDF Delivers a Data Framework for the Web

RDF - the Resource Description Framework - is a standard a way for
simple descriptions to be made. What XML is for syntax, RDF is for
semantics - a clear set of rules for providing simple descriptive
information. RDF Schema then provides a way for those descriptions to be
combined into a single vocabulary. RDF is integrated into a variety of
applications including:

     * library catalogs
     * world-wide directories
     * syndication and aggregation of news, software, and content
     * personal collections of music, photos, and events

In these cases, each uses XML as an interchange syntax. The RDF
specifications provide a powerful framework for supporting the exchange
of knowledge on the Web.

"RDF is part of the foundation of a major advance in the power of the
Web. Ultimately, we will see users and applications combining
information represented in RDF from multiple sources on the Web in ways
that, until now, have been inconceivable," explains Brian McBride, Chair
of the RDF Core Working Group, "The RDFCore Working Group has turned the
RDF specifications into both a practical and mathematically precise
foundation on which OWL and the rest of the Semantic Web can be built."

OWL Delivers Ontologies that Work on the Web

What's needed next is a way to develop subject - or domain - specific
vocabularies. That is the role of an ontology. An ontology defines the
terms used to describe and represent an area of knowledge. Ontologies
are used by people, databases, and applications that need to share
subject-specific (domain) information - like medicine, tool
manufacturing, real estate, automobile repair, financial management,
etc. Ontologies include computer-usable definitions of basic concepts in
the domain and the relationships among them. They encode knowledge in a
domain and also knowledge that spans domains. In this way, they make
that knowledge reusable.

OWL - the Web Ontology Language - provides a language for defining
structured, Web-based ontologies which delivers richer integration and
interoperability of data among descriptive communities. Where earlier
languages have been used to develop tools and ontologies for specific
user communities (particularly in the sciences and in company-specific
e-commerce applications), they were not defined to be compatible with
the architecture of the World Wide Web in general, and the Semantic Web
in particular.

OWL uses both URIs for naming and the description framework for the Web
provided by RDF to add the following capabilities to ontologies:

     * Ability to be distributed across many systems
     * Scalability to Web needs
     * Compatibility with Web standards for accessibility and
internationalization
     * Openness and extensibility

OWL builds on RDF and RDF Schema and adds more vocabulary for describing
properties and classes: among others, relations between classes (e.g.
disjointness), cardinality (e.g. "exactly one"), equality, richer typing
of properties, characteristics of properties (e.g. symmetry), and
enumerated classes.

"OWL takes a major step forward in representing and organizing knowledge
on the World Wide Web. It strikes a sound balance between the needs of
industry participants for a language which addresses their current Web
use cases, and the restrictions on developing an ontology language that
meshed with established scientific principles and research experience,"
explained Jim Hendler and Guus Schreiber, co-chairs for the Web Ontology
Working Group. "Over fifty Working Group members have successfully
designed a language that addresses both sets of concerns and is endorsed
by academics and practitioners alike."

RDF and OWL Documents Include Primers, Use Cases, Test Suites, to Aid
Developers

The W3C RDF Core Group has produced six documents. Each is aimed at
different segments of those wishing to learn, use, implement or
understand RDF. The RDF Primer is an introduction to, and tutorial on
how to use, RDF and RDF Schema. RDF Concepts and Abstract Syntax
specifies the fundamental concepts and information model of RDF. The
RDF/XML Syntax Specification (Revised) defines how to write RDF in XML
syntax. RDF Vocabulary Description Language 1.0: RDF Schema describes
how to use RDF to describe application and domain specific vocabularies.
RDF Semantics defines the mathematically precise formal semantics of RDF
and RDF Schema. RDF Test Cases defines a set of test cases that
illustrate aspects of the other specifications and may be used for the
automatic testing of implementations.

The W3C Web Ontology Working Group has produced six OWL documents. Each
is aimed at different segments of those wishing to learn, use, implement
or understand the OWL language. Documents include - a presentation of
the use cases and requirements that motivated OWL - an overview document
which briefly explains the features of OWL and how they can be used - a
comprehensive Guide that walks through the features of OWL with many
examples of the use of OWL features - a reference document that provides
the details of every OWL feature - a test case document, and test suite,
providing over a hundred tests that can be used for making sure that OWL
implementations are consistent with the language design - a document
presenting the semantics of OWL and details of the mapping from OWL to RDF.

Industrial and Academic Leaders Move Semantic Web Standards Forward

The RDF Core Working Group is comprised of industrial and academic
expertise, lending the depth of research and product implementation
experience necessary for building a common description framework for the
Web. Participants include representatives from Hewlett Packard, Nokia,
IBM, AGFA, ILRT Institute for Learning and Research Technology at the
University of Bristol, IWA International Webmasters Association and the
University of West Florida. The RDF Core Working Group builds on the
contributions of many other organization which developed the RDF Model
and Syntax (1999 Recommendation) and RDF Schema (1999 Proposed
Recommendation).

The W3C Web Ontology Working Group carries a complement of industrial
and academic expertise, lending the depth of research and product
implementation experience necessary for building a robust ontology
language system. Participants include representatives from Agfa-Gevaert
N. V; Daimler Chrysler Research and Technology; DARPA; Defense
Information Systems Agency (DISA); EDS; Fujitsu; Forschungszentrum
Informatik (FZI); Hewlett Packard Company; Ibrow; IBM; INRIA; Ivis
Group; Lucent; University of Maryland; Mondeca; Motorola; National
Institute of of Standards and Technology (NIST); Network Inference,
Nokia; Philips, University of Southampton; Stanford University; Sun
Microsystems; Unicorn Solutions along with invited experts from German
Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) Gmbh; the
Interoperability Technology Association for Information Processing,
Japan (INTAP); and the University of West Florida.

OWL brings together a number of groups that have been developing Web
ontology languages over the past decade. OWL is based the DAML+OIL
language, which was developed by an international team funded by the US
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the European
Commission's Information Science Technologies (IST) program. The
documents released today represent the maturation of this work shaped by
the members of the the World Wide Web Consortium.


Testimonials for W3C's Semantic Web Recommendations - RDF and OWL

These testimonials are in support of W3C's Semantic Web Recommendations
- RDF and OWL .

Adobe Systems | Aduna BV | Agfa-Gevaert N. V. | Boeing | Brandsoft, Inc.
| Institute for Learning and Research Technology, University of Bristol
| Creative Commons | DARPA | Fujitsu | HP | IBM | INRIA | Maryland
Information and Network Dynamics (MIND) Laboratory | University of
Maryland (UBMC) | McDonald Bradley, Inc. (MBI) | Mondeca | Mozilla
Foundation | Network Inference, Ltd. | Nokia | Profium | Semaview, Inc.
| University of Southampton | Sun Microsystems, Inc. | TopQuadrant

As the leading provider of content creation tools to help people
communicate better, adding intelligence to media via metadata was
integral to our strategy. We developed Adobe XMP (Extensible Metadata
Platform) based on RDF, because it provided a flexible and interoperable
framework for fostering the capture, preservation, and interchange of
metadata across digital media and workflows. The Adobe Creative Suite
provides a design platform that enables creative professional to create
information rich assets powered by XMP that can be more effectively
repurposed and consumed across multiple media and diverse domains.

-- David Burkett, Director of Product Management, Adobe Systems

Aduna B.V., located in Amersfoort, The Netherlands, http://aduna.biz/,
is very pleased to see both RDF and OWL become W3C recommendations. For
a company at the forefront of the developing products based on Semantic
Web technology, stable and well-engineered language standards are
crucial for our development work, for our products and for our
customers. Our current products such as the Sesame platform for storing
and querying meta-data heavily exploits the open framework that RDF
provides, and we expect to move to the use of OWL in the future. We will
continue to support the open standards defined by W3C by our continued
development of both commercial and open source software based on these
standards.

-- Martien van Steenbergen, CEO , Aduna BV

The Semantic Web is the representation of data on the World Wide Web. It
gives information a well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and
people to work in cooperation. Being committed to open standards, AGFA
actively participates in the Semantic Web Activity and is very glad to
see RDF and OWL as a W3C Recommendation. They are great, for instance,
to categorize medical images and their related data.

-- Jos De Roo, RDFCore and WebOnt WG member, AGFA Gevaert N.V.

Boeing is a member of the W3C and is an early adopter of RDF, OWL and
related Semantic Web technologies. Boeing has a number of projects
exploring semantics-based applications in various areas including
information and application integration and interoperability,
publish/subscribe, knowledge management and network centric operations.
These technologies are expected to have a strong impact on future Boeing
programs. Ontologies have become fairly widespread in their use and
automated reasoning tools are becoming mature. The time is ripe for
standards in this area, and for widespread tool support from vendors.

-- James L. Phillips, Director, Mathematics and Computing Technology,
Boeing Phantom Works

Brandsoft’s product offerings are one of the first commercial
implementations of Semantic Web components, mainly RDF. Our belief is
that enterprises that standardize on a common metadata framework, like
RDF, will gain significant value, agility, and substantial cost
reduction. They will also benefit from the ability to provide value
added services and applications within their extended enterprise
community (employees, customers, partners, etc.). As a result of using
RDF, Brandsoft has developed a standards based platform with the ability
to integrate the various tools needed to: Create, manage and reuse
content; Publishing capabilities for differing languages, media, and
devices; Establish relationships between people, processes, and systems

-- Frank Careccia, Vice President – Engineering and CTO, Brandsoft, Inc.

The University of Bristol is delighted to see the publication of the W3C
RDF and OWL Recommendations. The University is a strong supporter of
open standards and a long-term participant in the RDF work and considers
the Semantic Web as important in developing advanced learning and
research technologies for education.
Successful RDF-based projects at the University include representing
metadata schemas, describing thesauri, events and calendaring,
syndicating news, web site annotation and trust and smarter web
searching for digital libraries. The University intends to continue
developing projects, software and services based on this work.

-- Alison Allden, Director, Institute for Learning and Research
Technology (ILRT), University of Bristol

The efforts of Creative Commons to encourage permitted sharing and reuse
of works are greatly enhanced by the availability and continued
development of RDF, which serves as the machine-readable layer for our
"some rights reserved" licenses. One year after launch there are over
one million Creative Commons-licensed works published on the web,
supported by RDF-aware blog, browser, graphics, music, publishing,
search and validation applications and services. The upcoming new and
revised components of the RDF specification suite will provide a great
boost to the understanding and adoption of RDF, and thus our work to
cultivate an ecology of Creative Commons-aware software.

-- Mike Linksvayer, CTO, Creative Commons

The DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) program is pleased to endorse the
OWL Web Ontology Language produced by the W3C Web Ontology Working Group
based on the DAML+OIL language developed by the DAML program and its
European Union collaborators. We view OWL as a major advancement for the
Semantic Web, and have been using it extensively as part of our on-going
work to develop Semantic Web tools, rules, and services. We look forward
to the wide scale deployment of OWL on the World Wide Web.

-- Mark Greaves, Program Manager, Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency, U.S. Department of Defense

Fujitsu Laboratories of America - College Park is currently using OWL as
an integral part of our work on "Task Computing." Task Computing is a
novel integration of the Semantic Web with Web Services to provide users
with easier ways of achieving complicated goals in mobile and/or
ubiquitous computing environments. Ontologies defined in OWL give us a
powerful mechanism for reasoning about the composition of heterogeneous
services and the use of Web Services lets us access real devices and
displays. Together they enable new and rich forms of interaction between
users and their computing environment. The standardization of OWL and
RDF will facilitate the acceptance of innovative software methods such
as Task Computing.

-- Dr. Kazuhiro Matsuo, Senior Vice President and General Manager,
Fujitsu Laboratories of America

HP actively supports the development of the Semantic Web and welcomes
the new RDF and OWL Recommendations. HP's Semantic Web developers'
framework, Jena, (http://jena.sourceforge.net/) is an open-source,
freely available, implementation of both Recommendations, with a large
and active developer community. We look forward to the Web-scale machine
integration of knowledge and information that these new Recommendations
support.

-- Per-Kristian Halvorsen, Vice-President and Center Director, Solutions
and Services Research Center, HP Laboratories

IBM has a history of using progressive research to deliver business
value today and in the future. Our research work with the Semantic Web
has the potential to open the Internet to even more powerful
applications. Within IBM we have many active research projects working
with both RDF and OWL. Our first public Semantic Web project, SnoBase,
released on AlphaWorks, is a framework for loading ontologies from files
and using the Internet for locally creating, modifying, querying, and
storing ontologies. It provides a mechanism for querying ontologies and
an easy-to-use programming interface for interacting with vocabularies
of standard ontology specification languages including RDF, RDF Schema,
and OWL. SnoBase can help a broad range of business applications that
need knowledge sharing and reuse as well as information search and
navigation by using reasoning within a generic management environment.

-- Alfred Z. Spector, vice president, Services and Software, IBM Research

INRIA is pleased to see the publication of OWL and RDF as W3C
Recommendations. They will provide standard and stable grounds for our
developments on searching Web resources - through the CORESE search
engine - and on adapting knowledge sources - through the Transmorpher
transformation engine and alignment tools. INRIA already takes advantage
of available API for OWL and RDF, and expects these developments to
boost the Semantic Web deployment.

-- Gérard Giraudon, Director for Development and Industrial Relations, INRIA

The Maryland Information and Network Dynamics (MIND) Laboratory at the
University of Maryland focuses on helping to speed up the transition of
research into practice by partnering with industrial and/or government
teams in projects focused on advanced technology deployment. The
Semantic Web was identified by our lab as a priority area for this
transition, and we are working with a diverse set of partners in
bringing this important technology into wider practice. The MIND
Laboratory is proud to have co-chaired the Web Ontology Working Group
and believes OWL will be an important language in bringing the Semantic
Web to its full potential.

-- Jim Hendler, Director of Semantic Web and Agent Technologies, MIND
Laborator, University of Maryland

The use of ontologies is a key requirement for realizing the ubiquitous
computing vision. Ontologies defined in the Web Ontology Language OWL
can help ubiquitous and pervasive computer systems to share information
and knowledge, reason about their environment and interoperate. The
Semantic Web in UbiComp Special Interest Group is an international group
of researchers from academia and industry that is using OWL for
pervasive computing applications and defining ontology-driven use cases
demonstrating aspects of the ubiquitous computing vision.

-- Harry Chen, Department of Computer Science & Electrical Engineering,
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

McDonald Bradley, Inc. (MBI) is leveraging the expressiveness and
flexibility of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) today in its
support of many Department of Defense and Intelligence Community
customers. Specifically, the RDF model was a core design feature of the
DOD Discovery Metadata Specification (DDMS) Schema. RDF achieving the
status of W3C Recommendation will increase the number of tools while
stabilizing their maturity and features. This will enable MBI to better
deliver robust Semantic Web applications to its customers as they move
towards Net-Centric applications.

-- Michael C. Daconta, Chief Scientist, Advanced Programs Group, MBI

Mondeca is happy to welcome the advancement of OWL to W3C
recommendation. Always eager to make its technology conformant to the
widest range of semantic standards, the company has started to use OWL
since mid-2003 in customers applications, to describe and set up
knowledge models in its ontology-driven knowledge management platform, ITM.
ITM ontology layer was beforehand specified using proprietary internal
representation. Using OWL provides ITM with new capacity to describe it
in a standard and interoperable format, to re-use customer-defined or
public domain ontologies, and paves the way to future developments
integrating the power of inference tools.

-- Bernard Vatant, Senior Consultant, Knowledge Engineering, Mondeca

RDF gives us a data model for describing information organization
structures (metadata) for collections of networked information. Mozilla
uses it as a standard way to represent the many different structures we
use to organize the various kinds of information we handles --- from
bookmarks and email folders to address books and web services. RDF
remains important on the browser side not only because of these current
uses but also because of developing trends such as web logs and news
feeds that are based on RDF. This ability to deal with meta-data
independent of the protocols and formats associated with the data is
essential in moving the web forward.

-- Ben Goodger, Lead Engineer, Mozilla Firebird, The Mozilla Foundation

Network Inference congratulates the co-chairs and members of the W3C's
Web-Ontology (WebOnt) Working Group for their outstanding work on OWL.
OWL is a core component in building the semantic web, and in delivering
the means for true machine interoperation. OWL is central to the
solutions that Network Inference is fielding with enterprises today. The
quality of the Working Group's members, activities and outputs provide
OWL with robustness and integrity, and instill the level of confidence
in the language which is required for wide adoption. Network Inference
is committed to continuing to active contributions to W3C's efforts in
this area.

-- Jack Berkowitz, Vice President, Engineering, Network Inference
(Holdings) Ltd

Nokia congratulates the W3C on the promotion of the new RDF and OWL
specifications to full recommendations, which are expected to provide a
solid foundation for the development of the Semantic Web. Having
participated actively in both the RDF Core and Web Ontology Working
Groups since their inception, Nokia is well aware of the enormous effort
that has gone into this work, and applauds the hard-earned success of
the Working Group members.

-- Timo Poikolainen, Vice President of Marketing, Technology Platforms,
Nokia

Profium is pleased to see updated RDF specifications reach
recommendation status with W3C. Profium has been promoting the use of
Semantic Web technologies with its flagship product Semantic Information
Router (SIR) since its introduction in April 2001. Profium sees the
power of RDF and OWL best unleashed in the context of portal solutions
that ask for metadata repositories that can index both content and
service descriptions.

-- Janne Saarela, Managing Director, Profium Ltd.

Semaview understands the immense value of the emerging Semantic Web and
currently provides RDF versions of every calendar published onto the
eventSherpa Network. As more semantic islands are created and connected,
using RDF and OWL, new and exciting technology services will be created.
Semaview believes that innovation will flourish with the birth of this
truly intelligent Internet based on the W3C's Semantic Web work.

--Paul Cowles, VP, Development and Operations, Semaview, Inc.

The University of Southampton and the Advanced Knowledge Technologies
interdisciplinary research collaboration (AKT IRC) enthusiastically
endorse the W3C Resource Description Framework recommendations. The RDF
suite of specifications are fundamentally important to the success of
the W3C's Semantic Web initiative. RDF provides a common framework for
the expression of metadata and metadata schemata. Such metadata support
the semantic annotation of Web content and services, which underpin
knowledge integration and exchange. A number of leading research
projects within the University and AKT IRC are making extensive use of
RDF, including our scalable open-source RDF repository software, 3store.

The University of Southampton and the Advanced Knowledge Technologies
interdisciplinary research collaboration (AKT IRC) enthusiastically
endorse the W3C OWL Web Ontology Language recommendation, a key
specification in the W3C's Semantic Web initiative. OWL permits the
definition of sophisticated ontologies, a fundamental requirement in the
integration of heterogeneous information content. OWL ontologies will
also be important for the characterization of interoperable services for
knowledge-intensive processing on the Web. Research on next-generation
products and services within the University and AKT IRC is incorporating
OWL as standard.

-- Professor Nigel Shadbolt (Director), Professor David De Roure (Head
of Grid and Pervasive Computing), and Dr Nicholas Gibbins, AKT IRC,
University of Southampton

Sun Microsystems, a member of the W3C and the Web Ontology Working
Group, wishes to congratulate the co-chairs and members of the W3C
working groups on the successful publication of the RDF and OWL
recommendations. Sun's own internal enterprise ontology management
solution is based on RDF and associated Semantic Web technologies. RDF
provides Sun with the foundation for superior knowledge aggregation and
application integration.

-- Lew Tucker, V.P. Internet Services, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

TopQuadrant is encouraged by today’s announcement and strongly supports
W3C's standardization of OWL. Our Government clients understand that the
demands of e-Government solutions, such as Federal Enterprise
Architecture, digital preservation (NARA) and aerospace programs (NASA)
go beyond the current capabilities of XML. They realize that semantic
technologies are essential and, in particular, that OWL is critically
important for consistent and flexible enterprise data integration. In
response to strong interest expressed by our clients, TopQuadrant offers
a continuing program of Briefings and Workshops on Semantic Technologies
that showcase the use of RDF(S) and OWL.

-- Robert Coyne, President, TopQuadrant

Contact Americas, Australia --
     Janet Daly, <janet@w3.org>, +1.617.253.5884 or +1.617.253.2613
Contact Europe --
     Marie-Claire Forgue, <mcf@w3.org>, +33.492.38.75.94
Contact Asia --
     Yasuyuki Hirakawa <chibao@w3.org>, +81.466.49.1170

About the World Wide Web Consortium [W3C]

The W3C was created to lead the Web to its full potential by developing
common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its
interoperability. It is an international industry consortium jointly run
by the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT
CSAIL) in the USA, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and
Mathematics (ERCIM) headquartered in France and Keio University in
Japan. Services provided by the Consortium include: a repository of
information about the World Wide Web for developers and users, and
various prototype and sample applications to demonstrate use of new
technology. To date, nearly 400 organizations are Members of the
Consortium. For more information see http://www.w3.org/

Received on Tuesday, 10 February 2004 09:56:52 UTC