Ontology Language

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Discussion

An ontology language provides a formal means to express an ontology. It supplies constructs for representing concepts, relationships, classifications, assertions, constraints, axioms, annotations, and other ontology content.

An ontology language differs from the ontology itself. The language provides the expression mechanism. The ontology provides the domain commitments expressed through that mechanism.

Ontology languages and representation approaches differ in their assumptions, semantics, constraints, reasoning capabilities, and implementation tradeoffs.

Definition

formal language used to express an ontology

Source

Generalised from common ontology engineering usage and specialized for use in the FX Demo Reference Architecture.

Note

An ontology language differs from a graph store, serialisation format, modeling tool, or reasoner. Those technologies support ontology implementation, exchange, storage, or processing.

Example

OWL is an ontology language. An FX transaction ontology expressed in OWL uses OWL constructs and OWL reasoning semantics.

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