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

Hi Roger,
> 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.
There are a number of projects underway that are working on API's for OWL.
Among them is Jena [1,2], which includes an API for accessing OWL, DAML+OIL
and RDFS ontologies.  Jena2 (currently in early preview-release status) also
has a plug-in inferencing connector, to allow various description logic or
theorem proving reasoners be used to determine the entailments from the
source data and the OWL (or DAML or RDFS) semantics. Other approaches
include Sean Bechhofer's work at U. Manchester, the Kaon group and (I
believe) Aidministrator's Sesame. I'm sure there are others too (I don't
mean to leave anyone out deliberately!)

If you're advocating a *standard* OWL API, that's something we could discuss
- but my suspicion is that it's a little early in the game. Most of the work
that I know of is taking rather different approaches, and (imho) it's a good
thing that we're probing this space in multiple ways.

Cheers,
Ian

[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/jena
[2] http://www.hpl.hp.com/semweb

Received on Thursday, 24 April 2003 13:06:43 UTC