OWL: Yet to arrive on the Web of Data?

TL;DR

Despite OWL's standardization, its adoption on the Web remains limited, with a preference for a simplified OWL RL-based profile, leading to the proposal of a new OWL LD fragment tailored for Linked Data.

Contribution

The paper analyzes OWL's adoption on the Web, identifies the prevalent usage of a simplified OWL RL profile, and proposes a new OWL LD fragment optimized for Linked Data applications.

Findings

OWL features like owl:sameAs are popular, others are neglected.

The likely used OWL fragment is based on OWL RL.

A new OWL LD fragment is proposed for better Web adoption.

Abstract

Seven years on from OWL becoming a W3C recommendation, and two years on from the more recent OWL 2 W3C recommendation, OWL has still experienced only patchy uptake on the Web. Although certain OWL features (like owl:sameAs) are very popular, other features of OWL are largely neglected by publishers in the Linked Data world. This may suggest that despite the promise of easy implementations and the proposal of tractable profiles suggested in OWL's second version, there is still no "right" standard fragment for the Linked Data community. In this paper, we (1) analyse uptake of OWL on the Web of Data, (2) gain insights into the OWL fragment that is actually used/usable on the Web, where we arrive at the conclusion that this fragment is likely to be a simplified profile based on OWL RL, (3) propose and discuss such a new fragment, which we call OWL LD (for Linked Data).