profilesOWL

ProfilesOWL is a framework and vocabulary for representing personal profiles in the Web Ontology Language (OWL). It provides a core ontology designed to describe a broad range of user attributes, interests, relationships, and contextual information, with optional modules for domains such as employment, education, and preferences. The aim is to enable interoperable, machine-readable profiles that can be shared across applications while supporting reasoning and privacy controls.

Its architecture centers on a compact, extensible core augmented by domain-specific modules. Core concepts include classes such as Person, Attribute, Interest, Skill, Location, TimeInterval, and Preference, plus object properties like hasAttribute, hasInterest, knows, and isMemberOf. The model is designed to align with established vocabularies (for example FOAF, vCard, and schema.org) to improve interoperability, and it supports standard OWL reasoning patterns. Profiles can be serialized in RDF formats including RDF/XML, Turtle, and JSON-LD and queried with SPARQL.

Common use cases span personalized recommendations, profile exchange between services, and access-control scenarios where identity attributes influence permissions. ProfilesOWL supports reasoning to infer derived attributes and to check data consistency, while also encouraging privacy-preserving practices through policy annotations and consent markers on sensitive properties.

Maintenance and governance are typically community-driven, with open documentation, reference implementations, and versioned releases. The framework is intended to complement existing user-data vocabularies and data-sharing standards, rather than replace them. It is related to vocabularies such as FOAF, vCard, and schema.org, which it seeks to harmonize where feasible.