Semantic Web Languages – Towards an Institutional Perspective

Abstract. The Semantic Web (SW) is viewed as the next generation of the Web that enables intelligent software agents to process and aggregate data autonomously. Ontology languages provide basic vocabularies to semantically markup data on the SW.We have witnessed an increase of numbers of SWlanguages in the last years. These languages, such as RDF, RDF Schema (RDFS), the OWL suite of languages, the OWL− suite, SWRL, are based on different semantics, such as the RDFS-based, description logic-based, Datalog-based semantics. The relationship among the various semantics poses a challenge for the SW community for making the languages interoperable. Institutions provide a means of reasoning about software specifications regardless of the logical system. This makes it an ideal candidate to represent and reason about the various languages in the Semantic Web. In this paper, we construct institutions for the SW languages and use institution morphisms to relate them. We show that RDF framework together with the RDF serializations of SW languages form an indexed institution. This allows the use of Grothendieck institutions to combine Web ontologies described in various languages