How is OWL actually used when building a semantic web application?

Question

I\'ve been reading about semantic web technologies such as RDF and OWL, and am intrigued about the possibilities of building an RDF / triple-store semantic database on top of my

Answer 1

Yes, you can design your ontology in Protege and then import it into your Triple Store. If your Triple Store supports reasoning and you enabled it, your Sparql queries will produce different results.

For example you can define "related-to" as a super-property to "married-to", "child-of", "parent-of" and "sibling-of". Then you can ask for all "related-to" people.

Start experiemnting with a stand-alone triple store to understand the technology. Put aside interfacing with an RDB until you are comfortable with the basics.