Improving OWL

I am sure you are aware that the Web Ontology Language OWL is currently undergoing a revision by the W3C OWL Working Group. The revised version will be known as OWL 2, and is going to feature some enhancements of expressivity, and will also designate tractable sublanguages (called profiles).

What is less known is that the current effort to revise OWL was in part driven by the workshop series OWL – Experiences and Directions (OWLED), where the initial proposal for the revision was discussed as early as 2005. The OWLED series has become a major forum for the OWL community, where practitioners in the industry and academia, tool developers and others interested in OWL can describe real and potential applications, share experience and discuss requirements for language extensions/modifications.

The next installment of the OWLED workshop, OWLED2008, has just released its call for papers. So if you have an opinion how OWL could or should be improved, consider writing a note and participate in the meeting and the discussions. The general chair of OWLED2008, Alan Ruttenberg, is actually also co-chair of the W3C OWL Working Group, which obviously isn’t just coincidence.

OWLED2008 is going to take place end of October 2008 in Karlsruhe, Germany, and is co-located with the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2008), and the conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems. So it’s going to be a good place to be to get up-to-date news on what’s going on in and around the Semantic Web.