Welcome to my series of blog posts on the ABC's of Social Media, a tool that you can use to make you more "hip" in the world of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (just to name a few).  Today's letter is "O".  The letter "O" brings us OpenID, OpenSocial, Online and Offline but today's word is a bit more obscure.  Ever heard of XML?  How about OWL?

"O" is for OWL

OWL

Pronounced: Ou-Wuhl

No, I'm not referring tot he little metal bird from Clash of the Titans, but rather the Ontology Web Language. 

The Ontology Web Language (OWL) is a set of markup languages which are designed for use by applications that need to process the content of information instead of just presenting information to humans. OWL ontologies describe the hierarchical organization of ideas in a domain, in a way that can be parsed and understood by software.

OWL has more facilities for expressing meaning and semantics than XML, RDF, and RDF-S, and thus OWL goes beyond these languages in its ability to represent machine interpretable content on the Web. OWL has three increasingly-expressive sublanguages: OWL Lite, OWL DL, and OWL Full. OWL is part of the W3C recommendations related to the Semantic Web.