Thinking Clearly .

We are proud to announce the first release, version 0.1 (alpha), of Owlgres, a very scalable OWL reasoner that uses Postgres. It implements DL-Lite, a tractable profile of the upcoming OWL 2 standard. Owlgres supports consistency checking and conjunctive query reasoning services—the latter via SPARQL-DL.

Downloads and documentation can be found at the Owlgres site. For bug reports, feel free to open a ticket on our issue tracking site for Owlgres, which also summarizes the first steps with Owlgres on the Wiki page. There’s a mailing list for discussion and support.

Owlgres is dual-licensed; for open source projects, it’s available under the AGPL v.3. For commercial projects, commercial support licenses are available.

We’d love feedback on Owlgres and encourage people to try it out, play with it, and report bugs, issues, and ideas.

Whew! At the last OWL working group Face to Face, we decided to publish 6, count ‘em, working drafts. We’ve republished the core trio (syntax, semantics, and rdf-mapping which comprise the basic definition of the language) in order to promulgate the new OWL 2 name, and we’ve published 3 new documents (as first public working drafts, or FPWDs):

• An XML syntax which is very close to the functional syntax and much better suited than RDF/XML for XML-oriented toolchains
• A set of 3 “profiles” of OWL (this is the new name for the tractable fragments)
• A Primer

I’m very happy with all of these. Back when we were first preparing the OWL 1.1 documents, I pushed hard for an XML syntax and a new “rational” set of species and I’m glad to see the WG take them up. I’m especially pleased with the Primer as one might expect, being an author! But also I think it has the potential to make OWL much more accessible to people.

One feature I really l like about the primer is that the syntax of the examples is configurable to your favorite syntax. I’ve wanted something like that for years now. I have several more ideas for nice user configuration of the primer, and even more for the content.

While it is in a very first draft state, it’s already had some good effect. My pal Michel Dumontier took one look at an earlier draft and immediately ripped it off for a set of slides for his class. You can’t pay for that kind of love, folks!

I’ll have more to say about the profiles (EL++, DL Lite, and OWL-R) later, though I’ve done some preliminary work on primer text about them.

I’m hoping we’ll publish new drafts of the core trio in the next month or so that will show the new features and design changes we’ve added since publishing them as FPWD. The WG seems to be clicking along nicely; the F2F was highly productive.

The OWL WG is meeting in Washington, DC (well, Gaithersburg, actually—ick!) and, among many decisions reached today, has decided to name the next version of the Web Ontology Language “OWL 2”.

I’m excited by that decision in part because I think it will give the Semantic Web community and other groups of users, too, a new opportunity and reason to take a new, fresh look at OWL.

Tomorrow (4 April) is the last day; tonight is the traditional Working Group Dinner, which I’m especially looking forward to, since it’s being held at Dogfish Head Pub.

And, after a long day of spec-making, Beer is a Good Thing.