How does OIL relate to RDF/RDF Schema?
The above example was stated in OIL’s presentation syntax, which is intended for human readers and writers of OIL ontologies. For machines, OIL uses RDF as its syntax. OIL exploits as much as possible the modelling primitives of RDF Schema. This provides crucial backwards compatibility, allowing OIL ontologies to be treated as extensions of RDF and RDF Schema ontologies, and making OIL ontologies available not only to OIL-aware applications, but also to applications that are only RDF-aware: such RDF-aware applications can still process and reason with significant portions of OIL-ontologies. For illustration purposes, the last class of the above example in RDF syntax would look like:
