(August 20, 2003) - This week, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) issued Web Ontology Language (OWL) as a W3C Candidate Recommendation. Candidate Recommendation is an explicit call for implementations, indicating that the document has been reviewed by all other W3C Working Groups, that the specification is stable, and appropriate for implementation.

OWL is a language for defining structured, Web-based ontologies which enable richer integration and interoperability of data across application boundaries. Early adopters of these standards include bioinformatics and medical communities, corporate enterprise and governments. OWL enables a range of descriptive applications including managing Web portals, collections management, content-based searches, enabling intelligent agents, Web services and ubiquitous computing.

"OWL is an important step for making data on the Web more machine processable and reusable across applications, " said Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director. "We're encouraged to see OWL already being used as an open standard for deploying large scale ontologies on the Web."

For more information, see www.w3.org.