Introduction to Ontologies on the Semantic Web

To learn more about ontologies on the semantic web,

• The Web Ontology Language OWL is now a W3C Candidate Recommendation and is the undoubted champ when it comes to which ontology language to use. Check it out!


• The article The Semantic Web from the May 2001 Scientific American discusses the semantic web in general and the issue of ontologies on the web in particular.
  
  
  • For the brave, an extended example from that article goes into great detail about web markup and ontologies. Click here to begin.
    
    
  • For those with less time to spend, a quick overview of that same semantic web annotation can be found by clicking the icons on the right-hand side of my home page .
    
    
• The article Agents and the Semantic Web from IEEE Intelligent Systems describes how ontologies and web services can work together to enable more capable web agents to be created.
  
  
• The DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) program supports a lot of work on ontologies and the semantic web.
  
  
• The Semanticweb.org web site has much about the semantic web including this page which describes ontologies.
  
  
• An important early ontology language was the Simple HTML Ontology Extensions (SHOE) language developed by students at the University of Maryland.
  
  
  • The SHOE site has a very good introduction to creating ontologies which was written by Jeff Heflin whose doctoral thesis is on web ontology markup.
    
    
  • The SHOE site includes numerous publications describing web ontologies.
    
    

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