International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering Survey on Ontology Construction Tools

The paper presents a detailed survey on ontology development tools. Ontology development tool is used for building a new ontology from scratch or reusing existing ontologies. Some of the popular ontology The current work briefly describes the ontology development and presents a comparison summary of the ontology methodologies with respect to their features. The survey helps the ontology developer to understand the ontology development tool features and the various ontology development tools available in the current state of the art with the respective feature support by the tools. Semantic Web is central to enhancing human or machine interaction through the representation of data in a machine-readable manner [1]. To represent data in machine readable format, ontology is a good technique. Ontology plays a vital role in artificial intelligence, semantic web, software engineering, information retrieval, knowledge representation, knowledge sharing, knowledge integration, knowledge reuse, and so on. An ontology is a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization [2]. Implementing ontologies in an ontology language is complex and time consuming task without any kind of tool support. To ease this task several ontology building environments were created by various research groups and software development organizations. There are several kinds of ontology tools such as ontology development, ontology merge, annotation, ontology based querying etc. Few tools provide most of the functionalities either directly or through plug-in support. The current work presents ontology construction tools survey. After a comprehensive survey on ontology development tools with the respective features, a comparative table is presented. Table 1 shows the summary of comparison, X-axis shows various ontology development tools and Y-axis shows their features.