Markup Languages decided that DAML should be merged with OIL. The EU/US ad hoc Joint Working Group on Agent Markup Languages was convened to develop DAML+OIL as a web ontology language. This group was jointly funded by the DARPA (under the DAML program) and the European Union's Information Society Technologies (IST) funding project. DAML+OIL was intended to be a thin layer above RDFS, with formal semantics based on a description logic (DL). DAML+OIL is a particularly major influence on OWL; OWL's design was specifically based on DAML+OIL. Semantic web standards RDF schema In the late 1990s, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Metadata Activity started work on RDF Schema (RDFS), a language for RDF vocabulary sharing. The RDF became a W3C Recommendation in February 1999, and RDFS a Candidate Recommendation in March 2000. In February 2001, the Semantic Web Activity replaced the Metadata Activity. In 2004 (as part of a wider revision of RDF) RDFS became a W3C Recommendation. Though RDFS provides some support for ontology specification, the need for a more expressive ontology language had become clear. Web-Ontology Working Group The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) created the Web-Ontology Working Group as part of their Semantic Web Activity. It began work on November 1, 2001 with co-chairs James Hendler and Guus Schreiber. The first working drafts of the abstract syntax, reference and synopsis were published in July 2002. OWL became a formal W3C recommendation on February 10, 2004 and the working group was disbanded on May 31, 2004. OWL Working Group In 2005, at the OWL Experiences And Directions Workshop a consensus formed that recent advances in description logic would allow a more expressive revision to satisfy user requirements more comprehensively whilst retaining good computational properties. In December 2006, the OWL1.1 Member Submission was made to the W3C. The W3C chartered the OWL Working Group as part of the Semantic Web Activity in September 2007. In April 2008, this group decided to call this new language OWL2, indicating a substantial revision. OWL 2 became a W3C recommendation in October 2009. OWL 2 introduces profiles to improve scalability in typical applications. Acronym OWL was chosen as an easily pronounced acronym that would yield good logos, suggest wisdom, and honor William A. Martin's One World Language knowledge representation project from the 1970s. Adoption A 2006 survey of ontologies available on the web collected 688 OWL ontologies. Of these, 199 were OWL