Dan Connolly has
announced the formation of the W3C Web Ontology Working
Group, which will develop a language to extend the semantic
reach of RDF.
The new WG's charter describes its main deliverable:
A Web ontology language, that builds on current
Web languages that allow the specification of classes and
subclasses, properties and subproperties (such as RDFS), but which
extends these constructs to allow more complex relationships
between entities including: means to limit the properties of
classes with respect to number and type, means to infer that items
with various properties are members of a particular class, a
well-defined model of property inheritance, and similar semantic
extensions to the base languages.
Chaired by Jim Hendler, the working group will take DAML+OIL as
its starting point. The target date for a W3C Recommendation is
September 2002.
(Apologies for the somewhat delayed reporting of this
announcement -- ED.)