OIL: an ontology infrastructure for the Semantic Web

Researchers in artificial intelligence first developed ontologies to facilitate knowledge sharing and reuse. Ontologies play a major role in supporting information exchange across various networks. A prerequisite for such a role is the development of a joint standard for specifying and exchanging ontologies. The authors present OIL, a proposal for such a standard. Ontologies applied to the World Wide Web are creating the Semantic Web.