Introducing Customised Datatypes and Datatype Predicates into OWL

Although OWL is rather expressive, it has a very serious limitation on datatypes; i.e., it does not support customised datatypes. It has been pointed out that many potential users will not adopt OWL unless this limitation is overcome, and the W3C Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group has set up a task force to address this issue. This paper provides a solution for this issue by presenting two decidable datatype extensions of OWL DL, namely OWL-Eu and OWL-E. OWL-Eu provides a minimal extension of OWL DL to support customised datatypes, while OWL-E extends OWL DL with both customised datatypes and customised datatype predicates.