Making the Web Safe for Intelligent Agents

Ontology is a branch of Philosophy that deals with the nature of being. Ontologies are a theories of what exists and help us experience and operate in the world by, as Plato put it, "carving nature at its joints". In information systems, ontologies are explicit formal specifications of a domain's concepts, objects, and relations. Ontologies provide both a model of information to be represented and a vocabulary to use in describing it. The OWL Web Ontology Language is a markup language developed by the W3C that is grounded in ontologies. I will describe the advantages and challenges of using OWL to model and describe information and knowledge in distributed system and describe our initial experience in using it in several current research projects.

Presented at the NSF/NSDL workshop on scientific markup languages.