What are the design principles behind OIL?
The following have been important reasons motivating the design of OIL: • maximising compatibility with existing W3C standards, as XML and RDF; • maximising partial interpretability by less semantically aware processors; • providing modelling primitives that have proven useful for large user communities; • maximising expressiveness to enable modelling a wide variety of ontologies; • providing a formal semantics (a mathematically precise description of the meaning of every expression) in order to facilitate machine interpretation of that semantics; • enabling sound, complete and efficient reasoning services, if necessary by limiting the expressiveness of the language.
