OWL 2.0 inches closer to completion

The OWL Working Group (OWG) of W3C, the standards-setting body for the Internet, published 11 documents on OWL 2.0 for comment on December 2. Six of the documents are last call working draft documents, and the remaining five are first public working draft documents.

The OWG is soliciting comments from the public. They are due by January 23, 2009.

OWL 2.0 is the next version of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) standard. Per the Charter Document for the OWG, OWL 2.0 makes the following changes to the previous version of OWL:

The extensions, referred to as OWL 1.1, fall into the following categories:

• Extensions to the logic underlying OWL, adding new constructs that extend the expressivity of OWL (e.g., qualified cardinality restrictions and property chain inclusion axioms).
• Extensions to the datatype support provided by OWL, e.g., with XML Schema Datatype semantics and datatype facets.
• Additional syntactic facilities that do not extend the expressive power of OWL but that make some common modelling paradigms easier to express (e.g., disjoint unions).

The Working Group will also define a set of language fragments—profiles, or subsets of the language—that have been identified as having interesting or useful properties (e.g., being easier to implement). Fragments may include some of the extensions that the Working Group adopts. One of the first tasks of the Working Group will be to determine how subsets are to be defined.

The next step in the process for the last call working draft documents is to become a Candidate Recommendation. Before becoming final, Candidate Recommendations go on to become Proposed Recommendations and then finally W3C Recommendations.