OWL/XDD: A Formal Language for Application Profiles

An application profile specifies a set of terms, drawn from one or more standard namespaces, for annotation of data, and constrains their usage and interpretations in a particular local application. An approach to defining an application profile using the OWL and OWL/XDD languages is proposed - the former is a standard Web ontology language and the latter is a definite-clause-style knowledge representation language that uses XML expressions as their underlying data structure. Constraints are defined in terms of rules, which are represented as XDD clauses. As an illustration, application of the approach to defining Dublin core metadata initiative´s library application profile (DC-Lib), along with the possibility of extending it by describing finer-grained semantic constraints, is demonstrated. A prototype catalog validation system has been implemented, and some experimental results are shown