Ontology Description using OWL to Support Semantic
Web Applications


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ABSTRACT

In The World Wide Web (WWW) serves the human with vast
amount of data and information.The usage pattern or user base has
multiplied many folds since its origin. Despite the increasing
importance gained by the WWW, to serve the human, it lacks the
feature to serve meaningful information to machine this means
that limited support for utilization of data and information is
achieved. Thus the web needs to be made Semantic wherein
different applications, agents, Web services and the web sites can
exchange information to their full potential. This calls for
representing the knowledge residing on WWW in a uniform
manner understandable by both man and machine.

INTRODUCTION

We The World Wide Web (WWW) has changed the way people
interact/communicate with each Other and the way commerce is
done. The WWW is serving human with information on Ecommerce,
E-health and many more The constraint that still limits
the utility of the Web is that it is supporting human interaction
and most of the information on the web is meant for human
consumption only, may it be viewing information making
purchases etc. These activities are not particularly well supported
by software agents or Web services. The WWW can be made
more useful if the information available is made meaningful for
the machine to interpret it thereby make the web Semantic. The
Semantic web initiative of the World-Wide-Web consortium
(W3C)[4] has been active for the past few years and efforts are on
to make the current Web contents for machine interpretable.

ISSUES ENVISAGING CURRENT WEB

The current web has grown manifolds since its origin this growth
has not only been in the size of the number of users its serves [1]
but also the volumes of pages that it stores. The WWW today
supports E-commerce, E-health, E-education and E-governance
activities to name a few, each of these need information in
different formats to be understandable to the end users. It is also
obvious that the data/objects (instances of classes) for Egovernance
and E-health for a given geographical distribution
may be common or identical .Thus the problem arises of data
redundancy .Similarly two car dealers of a same parent supplier
needs to maintain identical product database thus increasing the
volume of data on the web and also leading to redundancy issues.

ONTOLOGY SUPPORT TO THE WWW

Ontology is used to define a common vocabulary for particular
domain. This vocabulary will be used to represent knowledge
which can be shared by user and it will also be suitable for
machine interpretability. Ontology as the term is used in the field
of Knowledge representation and it is usually defined as “a
representation of conceptualization” [2].An ontology defines the
terms that may be used to describe or represent an area of
knowledge [3].
Sharing common understanding of the structure of
information or software agents is one of the most common
purpose of ontologies [4,5] In context of the web, ontologies
provide a shared understanding of a domain.

ONTOLOGY REPRESENTATIONS
THROUGH OWL

OWL: Web Ontology Language
OWL [3,15] is language by W3C consortium OWL is a language
for describing and creating instances of ontologies. The purpose
of ontologies has been desribed in section 3 of this paper.Owl is a
language which is based on XML/RDF syntax .The Owl ontology
can normally be placed on Web Servers as normal web documents
which can be referred by other ontologies and can be used by
other applications ,Web Services and software agents as the need
be.
The under mentioned ontology example with certain
modifications can be implemented using OWL editor Protégé, a
free open-source editing framework developed by Stanford
University.