Potential Modeling and Simulation Applications
of the Web Ontology Language - OWL"
Lee Lacy and William Gerber (Dynamics Research Corporation)
Abstract
The Semantic Web is an evolution of the current world-wide web that
provides explicit semantics that enable software applications to better
process information representations. The Web Ontology Language - OWL -
is a new language for representing information on the semantic web. The
modeling and simulation (M&S) industry has many information
representation challenges because of the heterogeneity of data.
Examples of M&S data include data tables from authoritative data
sources, composable behaviors for computer generated forces, and
descriptions of units/entities to be simulated. Although the Extensible
Markup Language (XML) is beginning to be widely used for these purposes,
it lacks the explicit semantics and standard methods of representation
needed. OWL provides a consistent syntax using the Resource Description
Framework (RDF) and predefined constructs with standard semantics.
These features enable better information sharing and support reasoning
by inferencing systems. OWL is best used for representing
object-oriented descriptions of items in a particular domain. It could
be used in the M&S community to support distributed representations of
data, composable behaviors, and descriptions of units and objects to be
simulated.