Ontology Management Infrastructures

In this chapter we examine tools for ontology management. A state of the art analysis of the currently existing tools like editors, browsers and reasoners shows a number of deficits like many isolated tools, which cover only a small part of the lifecycle. Thus there is the need for an integrated environment for ontology management. Based on these deficits we define for such an integrated environment critical requirements, which cover the whole engineering lifecycle of large scale ontologies in a distributed environment. The NeOn architecture—a reference architecture for ontology management tools—addresses these requirements through a layered and extensible architecture. It enhances ontology management techniques with mechanisms for large distributed semantic applications. It also opens traditional closed ontology management tools with a service-based integration into scalable standard infrastructures. The NeOn toolkit as the reference implementation of the NeOn architecture resolves the deficits of these tools concerning the stated requirements.