https://oboacademy.github.io/obook/explanation/owl-format-variants/
A formalism or formal language can be used to describe entities and their relationships in an ontology. The most important formalisms we have are:
Web Ontology Language (OWL): OWL is by far the dominant formalism in the biomedical domain due to its inference capabilities.
RDF(S): Is a generally weaker language than OWL, but widely used by triple stores and other SPARQL engines. RDF(S) is lacking some of the strong logical guarantees that come with OWL and should only be used in scenarios where scalability (computation time) is the primary concern.
OBO: OBO used to be the dominant language in the biomedical domain before the advent of OWL. I also used to have its own specific semantics associated with it. OBO semantics have since been mapped into OWL semantics, so that for all practical purposes, we consider "OBO" now a dialect of OWL, which means that when you hear 'OBO format' today, we are generally referring to the serialisation (see below), NOT the formalism. Note that when we say OBO ontologies we mean literally Open Biomedical and Biological Ontologies, and NOT Ontology in OBO format.

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