Ontological tools: Requirements, design issues and perspectives

Abstract

An Ontological or Ontology Engineering tool is a piece of software that aims to support the engineering of ontologies. The engineering of ontologies concerns specific processes and tasks needed to be executed by domain experts and ontology engineers during the life-cycle of ontologies. The main objective of ontology engineering tools, especially in the context of the Semantic Web, is to provide certain functionality to users towards constructing shared and evolving ontologies. The aim of this article is to provide an understanding of the functionalities and technologies that need to be integrated in ontology engineering environments and to present issues that next generation ontological tools must consider in order to play a key role in the era of information and knowledge management. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010.