Ontology editor

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Ontology editors are applications designed to assist in the creation or manipulation of ontologies. They often express ontologies in one of many ontology languages. Some provide export to other ontology languages however.

[edit] Decision criteria for software choice

Among the most relevant criteria for choosing an ontology editor are the degree to which the editor abstracts from the actual ontology representation language used for persistence and the visual navigation possibilities within the knowledge model. Next come built-in inference engines and information extraction facilities, and the support of upper ontologies such as OWL-S, Dublin Core, etc. Another important feature is the ability to import & export foreign knowledge representation languages for ontology matching.

[edit] Example editors

Knoodl (Free web application/service that is an ontology editor, wiki, and ontology registry. Supports creation of communities where members can collaboratively import, create, discuss, document and publish ontologies. Supports OWL, RDF, RDFS, and SPARQL queries. Available in early Nov 2006 from Revelytix, Inc..)
TopBraid Composer (Eclipse-based, downloadable, full support for RDFS and OWL, built-in inference engine, SWRL editor and SPARQL queries, visualization, import of XML and UML, from TopQuadrant)
Java Ontology Editor (JOE) (1998)
Ontolingua (Web service offered by Stanford University)
Chimaera (Other web service by Stanford)
OntoEdit (Web service offered by the University of Karlsruhe)
OilEd (Java-based, downloadable, GPL, many users, from the University of Manchester)
Protege (Java-based, downloadable, open source, many sample ontologies, from the University of Stanford)
OBO-Edit (Java-based, downloadable, open source, developed by the Gene Ontology Consortium for editing biological ontologies)
ScholOnto (net-centric representations of research)
Swoop (OWL Ontology browser and editor from the University of Maryland)
WebODE (Web service offered by the Technical University of Madrid)
KAON (single user and server based solutions possible, open source, from IPE Karlsruhe)
KMgen (Ontology editor for the KM language. KM: The Knowledge Machine)
LinKFactory Java-Based Commercial Ontology editor, collaborative multi-user support, highly scalable (several millions of knowledge objects), full support for OWL, minimal processing time, allows a multilingual approach, from Language and Computing
DOME (DERI Ontology Management Environment), Eclipse-based, open-source