OWL has been designed to support reasoning
with tools such as Racer within Prot?©g?© to support this and forms part of the activity
surrounding Semantic Web development. Like RDF, OWL makes an open-world
assumption, so a class defined in one ontology can be extended in further ontologies
(McGuinness & Van Harmelen, 2004).
The ontology described next provides a foundation for an Australian timber and
wood product ontology, because of the open-world assumption by both RDF and
OWL this ontology can be extended to generalise the ontology to more organisations.
The foundation of this ontology is a product listing detailing categories that
the organisations 40,000 products fit into. The products are organised into broad
categories dependent upon timber attributes, this forms a hierarchy of classes which
can be used for machine processing in the Semantic Web or as a basis of an XML
document.
The classes, properties, and instances in this model can be explicitly defined by using
OWL. As OWL is based on XML it is verbose so that it is not possible to show
the whole ontology, examples of a class and the namespace declaration are given
Figure 3.
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