Using Ontologies in the Semantic Web: A Survey

The Semantic Web is well recognized as an effective infrastructure to enhance visibility of knowledge on the Web. The core of the Semantic Web is ontology, which is used to explicitly represent our conceptualizations. Ontology engineering in the Semantic Web is primarily supported by languages such as RDF, RDFS and OWL. This chapter discusses the requirements of ontologies in the context of the Web, compares the above three languages with existing knowledge representation formalisms, and surveys tools for managing and applying ontologies. Advantages of using ontologies in both knowledge-base-style and database-style applications are demonstrated using three real world applications.