Syndication on the internet has drawn lots of interest in the past few years. Having said that, present day state-of-the-art syndication techniques still offer relatively weak expressive power from a modeling perspective and offer minimal automated reasoning support. If a more expressive approach with a formal semantics can be offered, numerous advantages can be achieved, such as a rich semantics-based mechanism for indicating subscriptions and published content and automated reasoning for discovering subscription matches not found using traditional syntactic syndication techniques. In this report, I build a syndication framework depending on the Web Ontology Language (OWL), which is the standardized language for representing the semantics of information on the Web. One of the primary benefits of the framework is its support for formal reasoning, as the semantics of subsets of OWL are founded in description logic (a decidable fragment of first-order logic)…
Source: University of Maryland