OWL Editing Environments

There are not, at present, a large number of well-designed editing environments for building OWL ontologies. Of course if an OWL ontology is represented in RDF triples, which is XML, any text editor or XML editor can be used to view and edit an OWL ontology. However, a more graphical editor showing subsumption and other properties graphically would be very desirable. 

Protege is an open-source, Java-based ontology editing environment developed by Stanford University. Protege has evolved over several years, and has a plug-in architecture allowing support of various ontology representations or languages. An OWL plug-in, as well as OWL graphing and visualization plug-ins, is available. Protege with the OWL plug-in is probably the most advanced OWL editing environment available at this time.

OilEd is an experimental ontology editor, initially created to support OIL (Ontology Inference Layer) at the University of Manchester. It is suitable for small ontologies. The research teams at Manchester and Stanford have joined forces in some areas of ontology development.

References
Copyright 2004 General Electric
A. W. Crapo, GE Global Research
Last revised 09/07/2004