XML Schemas? What do ontologies buy me that XML and XML Schema don ?
This issue is also related to the issue of using XML or RDF, addressed in a previous question. First of all, let us quote from the OWL Guide recommendation: • An ontology differs from an XML Schema in that it is a knowledge representation, not a message format. Most industry based Web standards consist of a combination of message formats and protocol specifications. These formats have been given an operational semantics, such as, “Upon receipt of this PurchaseOrder message, transfer Amount dollars from AccountFrom to AccountTo and ship Product.” But the specification is not designed to support reasoning outside the transaction context. For example, we won’t in general have a mechanism to conclude that because the Product is a type of Chardonnay it must also be a white wine. • One advantage of OWL ontologies will be the availability of tools that can reason about them.
