Survey on ontology languages

Abstract

Nowadays a number of papers are presented on the research for the ontology application for a business system modelling. For this purpose formal and executable ontologies earn a lot of attention. However, formality and executability of an ontology depends on a language, which is used to present it. This paper presents a never completely account of languages that have been used for the research community for representing ontologies. The most popular four ontology languages (KIF, OWL, RDF + RDF(S) and DAML+OIL) are reviewed. Their advantages and disadvantages are discussed. Finally, thirteen comparison criteria are distinguished and chosen ontology languages are compared. The discussion is also presented in the paper.