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In addition to OWL 2 DL and OWL 2 Full, OWL 2 specifies three profiles. OWL 2, in general, is a very expressive language (both computationally and for users) and thus can be difficult to implement well and to work with. These additional profiles are designed to be approachable subsets of OWL 2 sufficient for a variety of applications. As with OWL 2 DL, computational considerations are a major requirement of these profiles (and they are all much easier to implement with robust scalability given existing technology), but there are many subsets of OWL 2 that have good computational properties. The selected OWL 2 profiles were identified as having substantial user communities already, although there were several others not included and one should expect more to emerge. The [OWL 2 Profiles] document provides a clear template for specifying additional profiles.
In order to guarantee scalable reasoning, the existing profiles share some limitations regarding their expressiveness. In general, they disallow negation and disjunction, as these constructs complicate reasoning and have proved to be only rarely needed for modeling. For example, in none of the profiles it is possible to specify that every person is either male or female. Further specific modeling restrictions of the profiles will be dealt with in the sections on the individual profiles.
We discuss each profile and its design rationale, and provide some guidance for users in selecting which profile to work with. Please be aware that this discussion is not comprehensive, nor can it be. Part of any decision has to be based on available tooling and how that fits in with the rest of your system or workflow. A more extended discussion and comparison of the profiles can be found in the literature [OWL 2 Profiles Introduction].
By and large, different profiles can be distinguished syntactically, and some of the profiles contain others. For example, OWL 2 DL can be seen as a syntactic fragment of OWL 2 Full and OWL 2 QL is a syntactic fragment of OWL 2 DL (and thus of OWL 2 Full). None of these profiles below is a subset of another. Ideally, one can use a reasoner (or other tool) that is conforming for a superprofile on the subprofile with no change in the results derived. In particular, every conforming OWL 2 DL reasoner is also a conforming reasoner for OWL 2 EL, OWL 2 RL, and OWL 2 QL (but may differ in performance since the OWL 2 DL reasoner is tuned for a more general set of cases). Each of the two semantics of OWL 2 (see Section 9) can be used for any of the profiles, but it is most common to use Direct Semantics for OWL 2 EL and OWL 2 QL, and RDF-Based Semantics for OWL 2 RL.