Dan Connolly has announced the formation of the W3C Web Ontology Working Group, which will develop a language to extend the semantic reach of RDF.

The new WG's charter describes its main deliverable:

A Web ontology language, that builds on current Web languages that allow the specification of classes and subclasses, properties and subproperties (such as RDFS), but which extends these constructs to allow more complex relationships between entities including: means to limit the properties of classes with respect to number and type, means to infer that items with various properties are members of a particular class, a well-defined model of property inheritance, and similar semantic extensions to the base languages.

Chaired by Jim Hendler, the working group will take DAML+OIL as its starting point. The target date for a W3C Recommendation is September 2002.

(Apologies for the somewhat delayed reporting of this announcement -- ED.)