I. Horrocks
1 , D. Fensel 2 , J. Broekstra
3 , S. Decker 4 , M. Erdmann
4 , C. Goble 1 , F. van Harmelen
2,3 ,
M. Klein 2 , S. Staab
4 , R. Studer 4 , and E. Motta
5
1 Department of Computer Science, University
of Manchester, UK, {horrocks, carole}@cs.man.ac.uk
2 Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Holland, {dieter,
frankh, mcaklein}@cs.vu.nl
3 AIdministrator Nederland B.V., jeen.broekstra@aidministrator.nl,
frank.van.harmelen@aidministrator.nl
4 AIFB, University of Karlsruhe, D-76128, Germany,
{sde, mer, sst, rst}@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de
5 Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University,
UK, e.motta@open.ac.uk
Currently computers are changing from single isolated devices to entry points into a worldwide network of information exchange and business transactions. Therefore, support in the exchange of data, information, and knowledge is becoming the key issue in computer technology today. Ontologies provide a shared and common understanding of a domain that can be communicated between people and across application systems. Ontologies will play a major role in supporting information exchange processes in various areas. A prerequisite for such a role is the development of a joint standard for specifying and exchanging ontologies. This paper deals with precisely this necessity. We will present OIL which is a proposal for such a standard. It is based on existing proposals such as OKBC, XOL and RDF, and enriches them with necessary features for expressing rich ontologies. The paper presents the motivation, underlying rationale, modeling primitives, syntax, semantics, and tool environment of OIL. With OIL, we want to make a proposal that initiates a discussion leading to a useful and well defined consensus amongst a large community which could use such an approach.