.. _Export_ExportOntologyAsOWLFile: Export > Export Ontology as OWL File ------------------------------------ This feature can be used to export the current Ontology asset collection into a downloadable OWL file. The conversion process between SHACL and OWL includes all rules that are used by :ref:`Export_ExportOntologyAsRDFSchemaFile`, but also OWL-specific rules. This may be a good starting point when you need to interact with OWL-based tools that cannot properly handle SHACL, such as OWL reasoners. .. note:: Even if they share many features including cardinality and type constraints, OWL and SHACL have some substantial semantic differences. In particular, OWL is based on the so-called *Open-World-Assumption*, which makes it difficult to express or validate certain constraints. For example, if a Person has two biological fathers, an OWL engine would not flag this as a mistake but instead infer that these two fathers must be the same Person. As a result, OWL is best used for certain types of inferences, while SHACL is best for closed-world use cases that are typically found in enterprise applications. .. caution:: Like the RDF Schema conversion, the mapping to OWL is based on heuristics and is lossy, because not all SHACL features have an equivalent construct in OWL. .. tip:: The exact SHACL rules that are used for the conversion can be found in the graph with URI ``http://datashapes.org/shacl2owl`` in the workspace. **See Also** * :ref:`Export_ExportOntologyAsRDFSchemaFile` * :ref:`Manage_AlsoCreateGlobalOWLProperties` * :ref:`Transform_ConvertOWLAxiomsToSHACLConstraints` **Further Reading on SHACL** * `Form Generation using SHACL and DASH (External Link) `_ * `SHACL Advanced Features Specification (External Link) `_ * `SHACL W3C Specification (External Link) `_ **Further Reading on Ontologies** * :ref:`working_with_ontologies_target` **Further Reading on TopBraid** * :ref:`introduction`