OIL can be regarded as an Ontology

Ontology (computer science)

In computer science and information science, an ontology formally represents knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain, and the relationships between those concepts. It can be used to reason about the entities within that domain and may be used to describe the domain.In theory, an ontology is...

 infrastructure for the Semantic Web

Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of...

. OIL is based on concepts developed in Description Logic

Description logic

Description logic is a family of formal knowledge representation languages. It is more expressive than propositional logic but has more efficient decision problems than first-order predicate logic....

 (DL) and frame-based systems and is compatible with RDFS.

OIL was developed by Dieter Fensel, Frank van Harmelen

Frank van Harmelen

Frank van Harmelen is a Dutch Computer Scientist and Professor in Knowledge Representation & Reasoning in the AI department at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam...

 (Vrije Universiteit

Vrije Universiteit

The Vrije Universiteit is a university in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The Dutch name is often abbreviated as VU and in English the university uses the name "VU University". The university is located on a compact urban campus in the southern part of Amsterdam in the Buitenveldert district...

, Amsterdam

Amsterdam

Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...

) and Ian Horrocks

Ian Horrocks

Ian Horrocks is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford in the UK and a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford . His research focuses on knowledge representation, particularly ontology languages , description logic, and optimised reasoning algorithms.His work on tableau reasoning for...

 (University of Manchester

University of Manchester

The University of Manchester is a public research university located in Manchester, United Kingdom. It is a "red brick" university and a member of the Russell Group of research-intensive British universities and the N8 Group...

) as part of the IST OntoKnowledge project.

Much of the work in OIL was subsequently incorporated into DAML+OIL and the Web Ontology Language

Web Ontology Language

The Web Ontology Language is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies.The languages are characterised by formal semantics and RDF/XML-based serializations for the Semantic Web...

 (OWL).

See also

• DAML
• DAML+OIL
• Ontologies
  Ontology (computer science)
  In computer science and information science, an ontology formally represents knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain, and the relationships between those concepts. It can be used to reason about the entities within that domain and may be used to describe the domain.In theory, an ontology is...