Getting Started with OWL (Should you feel that need)

Thursday, April 29, 2010 at 12:53PM
Charlie in Modeling Business Information Using XBRL, OWL, Protege, XBRL General Information, XBRL and the Semantic Web, RDF/OWL, XML, XBRL or RDF/OWL?

I spent about 4 hours trying to find some reasonable resources for getting started with OWL (Web Ontology Language).  I figured I would summarize what I did to get all set up and going with OWL.

OK, here are the key resources for getting started with OWL.

• The book Programming the Semantic Web (O'Reilly) is a good starter book for non-programmers.  This basically paints the big picture.
• The tool Protege, is an OWL editor mentioned in that book.  This web page is a good get started guide.  It has links to download the free application, a quick overview, etc.
• This 10 minute walk through helps you get going and points to two plug-ins you will likely want.
• This is a 100 page PDF on how to use Protege.

Even if you don't want to be an XBRL taxonomy master, OWL is a good thing to understand. It will really help you grasp where the world is going.

Article originally appeared on XBRL-based structured digital financial reporting (http://xbrl.squarespace.com/).