Ontology management

Abstract

Ontologies are considered a key technology enabling semantic interoperability and integration of data and processes. We are now entering a phase of knowledge system development, in which ontologies are produced in larger numbers and exhibit greater complexity than before. Ontology management infrastructures are needed for the increasing development of semantic applications especially in the corporate semantic web, which comprises the application of semantic technologies in an enterprise environment. This chapter presents a generic system architecture for an ontology management infrastructure that supports the construction of semantic applications. Such an ontology management infrastructure needs to be generic and flexible in its design, comprehensive in its functionality in order to meet the requirements of a wide spectrum of semantic applications. Key component functionalities of an ontology management system are discussed, including ontology mapping, ontology learning, debugging reasoning with inconsistent ontologies, and (structured and unstructured) query answering. An ontology management system architecture which can flexibly build upon existing datas sources and connect to other applications and which-as such-also forms the basis for a wide range of semantically enabled applications is described. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.