OWL 2 Core

What OWL 2 Core is

OWL 2 is a formal ontology language layered on RDF. It can describe equivalence and disjointness, property characteristics, class expressions, restrictions, keys, identity, and ontology version relationships.

“OWL 2 Core” is the name of Claimframe’s bundled package, not a separate W3C conformance profile. The bundle contains the 77 OWL-specific terms from the OWL 2 RDF-Based vocabulary plus the RDF, RDFS, and XML Schema dependency terms needed for explicit schema statements: 88 terms and 207 statements in total.

When an analyst would use it

Use OWL terms when the analysis must preserve or exchange a formally defined ontology:

• Record that two classes or properties are equivalent or disjoint.
• Describe inverse, symmetric, transitive, functional, or inverse-functional properties.
• Preserve explicit restrictions, cardinalities, property chains, keys, or ontology version metadata from an external model.
• Inspect or hand off a semantic model that already uses OWL identifiers.

OWL is rarely the best starting point for ordinary discovery notes or a first domain model. Its terms carry formal meanings that deserve deliberate modeling and review.

Example captures

architecture:Application owl:disjointWith architecture:Team @ontology
architecture:ownedBy owl:inverseOf architecture:owns @ontology
customer-record owl:sameAs crm:customer-4821 @identity-review
architecture:legacyService owl:deprecated true @ontology-review

Claimframe applies only the supported rules in an active vocabulary profile. It is not a complete OWL reasoner, does not validate arbitrary OWL ontologies, and does not execute ontology imports.

Defining authority

The World Wide Web Consortium defines these terms in OWL 2 Web Ontology Language: RDF-Based Semantics. For a more approachable introduction, see the OWL 2 Primer.