RDFS(FA): A DL-ised Sub-language of RDFS

Description Logics (DLs), as a field of research, form a formal foundation of first-order semantic Web ontology languages, such as DAML+OIL and OWL. The Semantic Web will build on XML's ability to define customized tagging schemes and RDF(S)'s flexible approach to representing data. RDF Schema (RDFS), however, has a non-standard metamodeling architecture, which makes some elements in the model have dual roles in the RDFS specification. As a result, the specification of its semantics requires a non-standard model theory, RDF MT. This leads to semantic problems when trying to layer DL-based and other conventional firstorder Web ontology languages on top of RDFS. In this paper we suggest layering Web ontology languages on top of RDFS(FA), a sub-language of RDFS, which is based on a (relatively) standard model-theoretic semantics. We will also compare this approach with the existing RDF Model Theory and show how their semantics relate to the semantics of OWL, a newly developed Web ontology language by W3C