OWL swoops down on the Web

Systems integrators will have a new Web language at their fingertips when they develop next-generation search tools and Web services.

The Web Ontology Language, known as OWL, was approved by the World Wide Web consortium and now joins Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Extensible Markup Language (XML) as standards for publishing data online.

OWL is based largely on a language developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to lend structure to the vast amounts of data that exist on the Web and in legacy applications.