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OWL 2 extends the W3C OWL Web Ontology Language with a small but useful set of features that have been requested by users, for which effective reasoning algorithms are now available, and that OWL tool developers are willing to support. The new features include extra syntactic sugar, additional property and qualified cardinality constructors, extended datatype support, simple metamodeling, and extended annotations.

The Manchester syntax is a user-friendly compact syntax for OWL 2; it is framebased, as opposed to the axiom-based other syntaxes for OWL 2. The Manchester Syntax is used in the OWL 2 Primer, and this document provides the language used there. It is expected that tools will extend the Manchester Syntax for their own purposes, and tool builders may collaboratively extend the common language. It is already used in Protégé 4 and TopBraid composer.