OWL (Web Ontology Language) seems to be the new emerging standard for defining RDF vocabularies. With this in mind, I dispatched my developer Derek to a small quiet room for a week to read the six core documents that comprise this specification. He has emerged slightly dazed but with some feedback.

Firstly, surprise surprise, he says that the specs are extremely readable and straightforward, a great improvement on some previous W3C specs which have required a brain the size of an elephant to digest. Derek recommends starting with the Overview, then move on to the Language Guide, keeping the Language Reference and XML Presentation Syntax docs to hand when the time comes to put theory into practice.

However Derek says that OWL is a complex specification and hard to hand code. Tool support will be vital for OWL to take off. With this in mind, Derek will be shortly road testing the Protégé-2000 (2.0 Beta) ontology editor which has OWL support.

I have myself noticed a slight error in the spec which I wish to bring to the attention of the Working Group. If OWL is the 'Web Ontology Language', should it not be called WOL?