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Reasoning Web 2012: Reasoning Web. Semantic Technologies for Advanced Query Answering pp 112–183Cite as

OWL 2 Profiles: An Introduction to Lightweight Ontology Languages

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Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNISA,volume 7487)

Abstract

This chapter gives an extended introduction to the lightweight profiles OWL EL, OWL QL, and OWL RL of the Web Ontology Language OWL. The three ontology language standards are sublanguages of OWL DL that are restricted in ways that significantly simplify ontological reasoning. Compared to OWL DL as a whole, reasoning algorithms for the OWL profiles show higher performance, are easier to implement, and can scale to larger amounts of data. Since ontological reasoning is of great importance for designing and deploying OWL ontologies, the profiles are highly attractive for many applications. These advantages come at a price: various modelling features of OWL are not available in all or some of the OWL profiles. Moreover, the profiles are mutually incomparable in the sense that each of them offers a combination of features that is available in none of the others. This chapter provides an overview of these differences and explains why some of them are essential to retain the desired properties. To this end, we recall the relationship between OWL and description logics (DLs), and show how each of the profiles is typically treated in reasoning algorithms.

Keywords

  • Inference Rule
  • Resource Description Framework
  • Description Logic
  • Conjunctive Query
  • Ontology Language

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, UK

    Markus Krötzsch

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  1. Markus Krötzsch
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  1. Institute of Information Systems, Knowledge-Based Systems Group, Vienna University of Technology, Favoritenstraße 9–11/1843, A-1040, Vienna, Austria

    Thomas Eiter & Thomas Krennwallner & 

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Krötzsch, M. (2012). OWL 2 Profiles: An Introduction to Lightweight Ontology Languages. In: Eiter, T., Krennwallner, T. (eds) Reasoning Web. Semantic Technologies for Advanced Query Answering. Reasoning Web 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7487. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33158-9_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33158-9_4

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