OWL (Web Ontology Language) is a family of notations for expressing properties of an RDF ontology, which vary in expressive power. The simplest, OWLlite, can express whether instances of a class should have particlar properties (say that animals have a number of legs) or that a class is a sub-class of another (e.g. Dalmation is a kind of dog). More complex variants allow oen to declare, for example, that a class can only have a fixed set of instances, or to use levels of meta-modelling where classes can be treated as instances. In general, simpler variants are easier to deal with and check computationally, but are less expressive.
Used on Chap. 17: page 395; Chap. 18: page 435
Also known as web ontology language
Links:
W3C: Web Ontology Language (OWL)
Wikipedia: Web Ontology Language