The OWL Web Ontology Language is a new formal language for representing ontologies in the Semantic Web. OWL has features from several families of representation languages, including primarily Description Logics and frames. OWL also shares many characteristics with RDF, the W3C base of the Semantic Web. In this paper we discuss how the philosophy and features of OWL can be traced back to these older formalisms, with modifications driven by several other constraints on OWL. Several interesting problems...

We show how to reduce ontology entailment for the OWL DL and OWL Lite ontology languages to knowledge base satisfiability in (respectively) the description logics.

The term Linked Data refers to a set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the Web. These best practices have been adopted by an increasing number of data providers over the last three years, leading to the creation of a global data space containing billions of assertions- the Web of Data. In this article we present the concept and technical principles of Linked Data, and situate these within the broader context of related technological developments. We describe progress to date in publishing Linked Data on the Web, review applications that have been developed to exploit the Web of Data, and map out a research agenda for the Linked Data community as it moves forward.

Although the OWLWeb Ontology Language adds considerable expressive power to the Semantic Web it does have expressive limitations, particularly with respect to what can be said about properties. We present ORL (OWL Rules Language), a Horn clause rules extension to OWL that overcomes many of these limitations. ORL extends OWL in a syntactically and semantically coherent manner: the basic syntax for ORL rules is an extension of the abstract syntax for OWL DL and OWL Lite; ORL rules are given formal meaning via an extension of the OWL DL model-theoretic semantics; ORL rules are given an XML syntax based on the OWL XML presentation syntax; and a mapping from ORL rules to RDF graphs is given based on the OWL RDF/XML exchange syntax. We discuss the expressive power of ORL, showing that the ontology consistency problem is undecidable, provide several examples of ORL usage, and discuss how reasoning support for ORL might be provided.

The Semantic Web consists of many RDF graphs nameable by URIs. This paper

SPARQL is the standard language for querying RDF data. In this article, we address systematically the formal study of the database aspects of SPARQL, concentrating in its graph pattern matching facility. We provide a compositional semantics for the core part of SPARQL, and study the complexity of the evaluation of several fragments of the language. Among other complexity results, we show that the evaluation of general SPARQL patterns is PSPACE-complete. We identify a large class of SPARQL patterns, defined by imposing a simple and natural syntactic restriction, where the query evaluation problem can be solved more efficiently. This restriction gives rise to the class of well-designed patterns. We show that the evaluation problem is coNP-complete for well-designed patterns. Moreover, we provide several rewriting rules for well-designed patterns whose application may have a considerable impact in the cost of evaluating SPARQL queries.

Abstract. This paper studies the RDF model from a database perspective. From this point of view it is compared with other database models, particularly with graph database models, which are very close in motivations and use cases to RDF. We concentrate on query languages, analyze current RDF trends, and propose the incorporation to RDF query languages of primitives which are not present today, based on the experience and techniques of graph database research. 1

Abstract. A common practice in conceptual modeling is to separate the intensional from the extensional model. Although very intuitive, this approach is inadequate for many complex domains, where the borderline between the two models is not clear-cut. Therefore, OWL-Full, the most expressive of the Semantic Web ontology languages, allows combining the intensional and the extensional model by a feature we refer to as metamodeling. In this paper, we show that the semantics of metamodeling adopted in OWL-Full leads to undecidability of basic inference problems, due to free mixing of logical and metalogical symbols. Based on this result, we propose two alternative semantics for metamodeling: the contextual and the HiLog semantics. We show that SHOIQ — a description logic underlying OWL-DL — extended with metamodeling under either semantics is decidable. Finally, we show how the latter semantics can be used in practice to axiomatize the logical interaction between concepts and metaconcepts. 1

Motivation: In silico experiments necessitate the virtual organization of people, data, tools and machines.The scientific process also necessitates an awareness of the experience base, both of personal data as well as the wider context of work.The management of all these data and the co-ordination of resources to manage such virtual organizations and the data surrounding them needs significant computational infrastructure support. Results: In this

The Semantic Web can be thought of as one large “universal” RDF graph distributed across many Web pages. Since the graph is an unwieldy view, we usually work with online RDF documents. This is natural and appropriate for most tasks