News Release: W3C Standard Facilitates Information Management and Integration

W3C Standard Facilitates Information Management and Integration

OWL 2 Connects the Web of Knowledge with the Web of Data

http://www.w3.org/ -- 27 October 2009 -- Today W3C announces a new 
version of a standard for representing knowledge on the Web. OWL 2, part 
of W3C's Semantic Web toolkit, allows people to capture their knowledge 
about a particular domain (say, energy or medicine) and then use tools 
to manage information, search through it, and learn more from it. 
Furthermore, as an open standard based on Web technology, it lowers the 
cost of merging knowledge from multiple domains.

"OWL 2 is the direct result of user experience," said Professor Ian 
Horrocks, University of Oxford and Chair of the OWL Working Group. "We 
learned a great deal from real world applications of OWL. The new 
version adds both power and speed: it standardizes those features most 
requested by OWL users, and introduces profiles to improve scalability 
in typical applications."

OWL 2 Designed to Meet Real-World Information Management Needs

Communities organize information through shared vocabularies. 
Booksellers talk about "titles" and "authors," human resource 
departments use "salary" and "social security number," and so on. OWL is 
one W3C tool for building and sharing vocabularies.

Consider the application of OWL in the field of health care. Medical 
professionals use OWL to represent knowledge about symptoms, diseases, 
and treatments. Pharmaceutical companies use OWL to represent 
information about drugs, dosages, and allergies. Combining this 
knowledge from the medical and pharmaceutical communities with patient 
data enables a whole range of intelligent applications such as decision 
support tools that search for possible treatments; systems that monitor 
drug efficacy and possible side effects; and tools that support 
epidemiological research.

As with other W3C Semantic Web technology, OWL is well-suited to 
real-world information management needs. Over time, our knowledge 
changes, as does the way we think about information. It is also common 
to think of new ways of using data over time, or to have to combine data 
with other data in ways not initially envisioned (for example, when two 
companies merge and their data sets need to be merged as well). OWL is 
designed with these realities in mind.

OWL can lower software development costs as well by making it easier to 
design generic software (search tools, inference tools, etc.) that may 
be customized by simply adding more OWL descriptions. For instance, one 
simple but powerful feature of OWL is the ability to deduce two items of 
interest as being "the same" — for instance, that "the planet Venus" is 
the same thing as "the morning star" and as "the evening star." Knowing 
that two items are "the same" allows smart tools to infer relationships 
automatically, without any changes to software.

OWL 2 Adds Expressive Power to Successfully Deployed Standard

W3C published the first version of OWL in 2004. OWL has already been 
successfully deployed in such diverse application areas as Oil & Gas 
exploration, eBusiness, health record management, semantic desktops, or 
management of musical archives; more case studies are available. The new 
features in OWL 2 are based on the features people most requested after 
using OWL 1. OWL 2 introduces OWL profiles, subsets of the language that 
offer easier implementation and use (at the expense of expressive power) 
designed for various application needs.

To get started with OWL 2, see the OWL 2 Overview and OWL 2 Primer.

EDITOR's NOTES:
===============

Web Resources:
--------------
This press release:
   - in English: http://www.w3.org/2009/10/owl2-pr.html.en
   - in other translations:
     http://www.w3.org/Press/Overview.html#x2009-owl2

These organizations expressed support of OWL 2 through testimonials: 
Clark & Parsia LLC | IBM | Kaiser Permanente | Karlsruhe Institute of 
Technology (KIT) | Mayo Clinic | Oracle | Sandpiper Software | Siemens 
Healthcare | University of Manchester | University of Oxford
For the full text of these testimonials, see:
     http://www.w3.org/2009/10/owl2-testimonial

OWL 2 Web Ontology Language - Document Overview:
     http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-overview/

W3C Semantic Web Activity:
     http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/

Semantic Web use cases and case studies:
     http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/sweo/public/UseCases/

Media Contacts
--------------
Contact Americas, Australia —
     Ian Jacobs, <ij@w3.org>, +1.718.260.9447 or +1.617.253.2613
Contact Europe, Africa and the Middle East —
     Marie-Claire Forgue, <mcf@w3.org>, +33 6 76 86 33 41
Contact Asia —
     Naoko Ishikura, <keio-contact@w3.org>, +81.466.49.1170

About the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
-----------------------------------------
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium where 
Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to 
develop Web standards and guidelines designed to ensure long-term growth 
for the Web. Over 400 organizations are Members of the Consortium. W3C 
is 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, and has seventeen outreach offices worldwide. For 
more information see http://www.w3.org

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Received on Tuesday, 27 October 2009 15:46:27 UTC