OntoEditor: a Web tool for manipulating ontologies stored in database servers

The Web is moving to a new generation in which machine-understandable processing is mandatory. In order to achieve this goal it is essential to define ontologies, which enable the modeling of application domains and can be shared and understood by different applications in different platforms. These ontologies are complex and so it is necessary to provide software tools which aim to facilitate ontology manipulation. We describe a new tool for ontology manipulation known as OntoEditor. OntoEditor is a Web tool, which has a graphical interface for representing an ontology graph. Moreover, OntoEditor uses a database management system for ontology persistency and query manipulation. The ontologies are represented internally as RDF and RDF Schema.

1. Introduction

In the last few years, application development has used Web browsers as the default interface. In these applications, the Web has been used for human communication. However, the new wave is to provide machine communication without human interference. For instance, e-commerce applications are examples of this new demand, which has been called semantic Web [1].