OWL currently has three dialects, which are listed in increasing complexity: OWL Lite, OWL DL, and OWL Full. OWL Lite and OWL DL are defined in manner so that every statement can be decided in finite time, whereas OWL Full can contain endless "loops."

Here we are concerned with Visual OWL (VOWL; pronounced as English word "vowel") which uses graphic concrete syntax (notation) for surface representation.

You can find out more about Visual OWL by exploring the resources below:

• Webs
• Modeling Tools
• Research Projects
• Books
• Papers
• Conferences
• Blogs
• Mailing Lists

Webs

• OWL Web Ontology Language Overview
  • W3C Recommendation 10 February 2004. Doesn't address visual OWL directly; provided as a background resource.
• A UML Presentation Syntax for OWL Lite
  • Incomplete draft
• Translations between UML, OWL, KIF and the WebKB-2 languages
  • Shows cases where UML can and cannot support common knowledge representation features associated with ontologies.

Modeling Tools

1. SemanticWorks (Altova)
   • Visual modeling tool that supports all three OWL sublanguages in addition to full support for RDF and RDFS.
2. TopBraid Composer (TopQuadrant)
   • An Eclipse-based ontology modeling environment that is uses Jena as its underlying RDF technology.
3. Integrated Ontology Development Toolkit (IODT) (IBM)
   • An Eclipse-based ontology toolkit for storage, manipulation, query, and inference of ontologies and corresponding instances.
4. Visual Ontology Modeler (Sandpiper Software)
   • A UML-based ontology modeling tool that enables component-based ontology development and management for use in collaborative applications and interoperability solutions. (Note: This tool is an add-on to the Rational Rose UML modeling tool.)
5. Integrated Ontology Development Environment (IODE) (Ontology Works)
   • Data modeling software produces high-fidelity domain ontologies.

Research Projects

• Protégé
  • Stanford sponsored research project developing a free, open source ontology editor and knowledge-base framework
  • Plugins and widgets
    • ezOWL Tab Widget
      • Visual OWL editor for Protégé.
    • OntoViz Tab Widget
      • Visualize Protégé ontologies with Graphviz graph drawing software.
    • OWL-S Editor Tab Widget
      • Visualize OWL-S services.
    • OWLViz Tab Widget
      • Navigate OWL ontologies and switch between asserted and inferred models after classification.
    • PromptViz Tab Widget
      • Visualize differences between two versions of an ontology.
    • TGViz Tab Widget
      • Visualize Protégé ontologies using TouchGraph library.
• MINDSWAP Group
  • Semantic Web research group inside the MIND LAB at University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies
• Swoogle
  • Semantic web search

Books

• OWL: Representing Information Using the Web Ontology Language by Lee Lacy.

Papers

• "The Semantic Web"
  • Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila, Scientific American, May 2001.
  • The seminal article about the Semantic Web concept.
• "Collaborative Knowledge Capture in Ontologies"
  • Pat Hayes, et al., Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Knowledge Capture, October 2005.
• "OntoSphere: More than a 3D ontology visualization tool"
  • Alessio Bosca, et al., 2nd Italian Semantic Web Workshop, Trento, Italy, December 2005.
• "Visual Modeling of OWL DL Ontologies Using UML"
  • Sara Brockmans, et al., 3rd International Semantic Web Conference, 2004.
• "Converting UML to OWL Ontologies"
  • Dragan Gasevic, et al., Proceedings of the 13th International World Wide Web Conference, New York, 2004.

Blogs

• Semantic Ontology by Dave McComb
• Tales of a Semantic Web Consultancy by Clark & Parsia, LLC

Mailing Lists

• N/A

Conferences

• SemTech 2006 - Semantic Technolog Conference
  • March 6-9, 2006, San Jose, CA, USA