How is OWL different from earlier ontology languages?
A. OWL is a Web Ontology language. Where earlier languages have been used to develop tools and ontologies for specific user communities (particularly in the sciences and in company-specific e-commerce applications), they were not defined to be compatible with the architecture of the World Wide Web in general, and the Semantic Web in particular. OWL rectifies this by providing a language which uses the linking provided by RDF to add the following capabilities to ontologies: • Ability to be distributed across many systems • Scalable to Web needs • Compatible with Web standards for accessibility and internationalization.
