Strong evidence suggests that OWL 2 will become an important standard for representing ontologies. According to the W3C its featured usage is to enable applications to meaningfully process information by means of reasoning. However, from the application's point of view this requires not only a language standard for ontologies but also a standard way to interact with components which supply reasoning or other services. OWLlink adds this latter piece of the ontology infrastructure by providing an extensible protocol for communication with OWL reasoning systems. The OWLlink protocol facilitates client applications to configure a reasoner, to transmit OWL 2 ontologies or fractions thereof, and to access reasoning services via a set of basic queries. Furthermore, OWLlink is flexible in that it allows to add any desired functionality by defining a corresponding extension.
The most recent and complete reference for OWLlink is the following:
@Article{owllink,
author = {Liebig, Thorsten and Luther, Marko and Noppens, Olaf and Wessel, Michael},
title = {OWLlink},
journal = {Semantic Web -- Interoperability, Usability, Applicability},
year = 2011,
volume = 2,
number = 1,
pages = {23--32}}
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