OWL ontology language boundaries - owl

Question

What are the OWL ontology language boundaries? Like:
Can I use a class with different parents? (Multiple inheritance) Protege doesn't allow this.
What characters I can or cannot use? e.g. Cannot use '#' or '^' in Protege. Why?
Case-sensitive classes? e.g. class A and a are two different classes?
What else?

Answer 1

The boundaries of OWL are determined by the boundaries of logic of the respective OWL dialect. This is the taxonomy of the OWL2 dialects:
-First Order Logic
--SWRL/RIF
---OWL DL
----OWL EL, RL, QL
-----Concept Hierarchies
--OWL Full
---OWL DL
----OWL EL, RL, QL
-----Concept Hierarchies
---RDFS
-----Concept Hierarchies
You can find more about these dialects here.
The most used dialect is OWL-DL, as it offers a good balance between expressiveness and decidability. There is a classification system for Description Logic to determine expressiveness:
"AL" allows: Atomic negation; Concept intersection; Universal restrictions; Limited existential quantification
"FL" allows:Concept intersection; Universal restrictions; Limited existential quantification; Role restriction
"EL" allows: Concept intersection; Existential restrictions
Then there are the following extensions:
"F" - Functional properties, a special case of uniqueness quantification.
"E" - Full existential qualification
"U" - Concept union.
"C" - Complex concept negation.
"H" - Role hierarchy (subproperties - rdfs:subPropertyOf).
"R" - Limited complex role inclusion axioms; reflexivity and irreflexivity; role disjointness.
"O" - Nominals. (Enumerated classes of object value restrictions - owl:oneOf, owl:hasValue).
"I" - Inverse properties.
"N" - Cardinality restrictions (owl:cardinality, owl:maxCardinality), a special case of counting quantification
"Q" - Qualified cardinality restrictions
"D" - Use of datatype properties, data values or data types.
According to this classification the expressiveness of OWL2-DL is (SHROIQ(D)), where "S" stands for An abbreviation for "ALC" with transitive roles. (Note: there is a terminological difference between DL and OWL, for example OWL specification uses "properties", while DL uses "roles").
So, the short answer to you question is: the boundaries of OWL2-DL are (SHROIQ(D)).
Can I use a class with different parents? (Multiple inheritance)
Protege doesn't allow this
You should be careful when trying to apply metaphors from other modelling paradigms. Strictly speaking "Parents" and "inheritance" are not applicable in OWL. We can say that there is something like sharing of properties but its direction - unlike in the Object Oriented paradigm - is upwards, not downwords. OWL uses "classes" but you should think of them as sets, not as "classes" from OO. Being sets, a class can be as sub-class of different classes and Protégé allows this. In fact it is used quite often. "Boar" is a subclass of both "Bear" and "Male", just as "Bull" would be a subclass of both "Cattle" and "Male". We can always find a set of properties to create a new class. All examples so far would be of course subclasses of "Mammal"and then of "Animal", but they can be also subclasses of e.g. "Two-eyed agents", a class, which can have subclasses that are not animals, for example "two-eyed robots".
What characters I can or cannot use
OWL has different serialisations such OWL/XML, Turtle etc. Each has it's own syntax.
As you asked for useful resources, one such would be of course the OWL primer. I would also recommend this free course.