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This paper discusses issues that surround the provision of application support using OWL ontologies. It presents the OWL API, a high-level programmatic interface for accessing and manipulating OWL ontologies. We discuss the underlying design issues and illustrate possible solutions to technical issues occurring in systems that intend to support the OWL standard. Although the context of our solutions is that of a particular implementation, the issues discussed are largely independent of this and should be of interest to a wider community.