Ontology Specification Languages for the Semantic Web

Abstract

The success of the third generation of the WWW, which is best known as the Semantic Web, relies on the ability of structuring the information that is distributed across all the resources that can be found on it. Ontologies will play a key role in this new Web, and the need of expressive, but at the same time efficient and simple enough, languages for describing this information is leading to the development of many languages which could be used in this environment. We study the expressiveness of the most representative ontology languages created in the context of the WWW and compare them using a common framework.