This document is written for readers who want a first impression of the capabilities of OWL. It provides an introduction to OWL by informally describing the features of each of the sublanguages of OWL.
A bigger part of the problem, though, is when people conflate the data model they’re working with and the syntax they use to represent it. Unfortunately, in some corners of the industry, XML-as-religion has caught on, and everything's Infoset, Infoset, Infoset.
When this happens, it becomes difficult to separate problems that people have with the underlying data model that is (or should be) shared among all use cases, and the syntactic conveniences and optimisations that are useful in a particular use case.
This document specifies usage scenarios, goals and requirements for a web ontology language. An ontology formally defines a common set of terms that are used to describe and represent a domain.