Description of Ontologies

As we discussed in Chapter 4, ontologies form the basic vocabularies for goal and Web service descriptions. More specifically, they define the terminologies used in the functional and behavioral descriptions, as well as the nonfunctional properties. This chapter is concerned with ontologies; the following two chapters are concerned functional and behavioral Web service descriptions, respectively.

WSML includes the WSML ontology language. In this chapter we define this language and the interaction between this language and the RDF schema [28] and OWL DL [46] ontology languages. We define the basic semantic notions that are used for representing and reasoning with ontologies, but also for representing and reasoning with functional and behavioral descriptions. To that end, Chapters 6 and 7 extend the notions defined in this chapter to suit the needs of the respective types of descriptions.