Re: WOWG: IMPORTANT - name issue

Jim Hendler <hendler@cs.umd.edu> writes:

> We have been informed of a possible trademark issue with the name
> OWL.  The W3C received email form a company called ontology works
> that:

>>> I would like to formally notify you, the W3C organization, and the
>>> appropriate responsible person(s) at W3C (including Tim
>>> Berners-Lee) that my company, Ontology Works, Inc., has filed
>>> trade marks on the acronym OWL which stands for Ontology Work
>>> Language.  The interested parties can visit our web site
>>> (www.ontologyworks.com) to see what we are involved in with regard
>>> to ontology.

> we have not yet discussed this among the chairs or the W3C
> Semantic-web coordination group, but I wanted to point it out to the
> group.  The message from Ontology works and TimBL's reply are at:

>> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/patent-issues/2002JanMar/0169.html

Also of interest may be the following:

Whitepaper which mentions OWL (and makes a trademark claim)
http://www.ontologyworks.com/whitepaper.pdf

I've checked again the USPTO's trademark search engine (TESS), which
contains both registered and pending (ie. filed) trademarks, but find
no mention of OWL in an ontology context.

-- 
Nick Gibbins                                            nmg@ecs.soton.ac.uk
IAM (Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia)             tel: +44 (0) 23 80592831
Electronics and Computer Science                   fax: +44 (0) 23 80592865
University of Southampton

Received on Monday, 25 March 2002 06:35:41 UTC