Automating ontology engineering support activities with OnToology

Abstract

Due to the increasing uptake of semantic technologies, ontologies are now part of a good number of information systems. As a result, software development teams that have to combine ontology engineering activities with software development practices are facing several challenges, since these two areas have evolved, in general, separately. In this paper we present OnToology, an approach to manage ontology engineering support activities (i.e., documentation, evaluation, releasing and versioning). OnToology is a web-based application that builds on top of Git-based environments and integrates existing semantic web technologies. We have validated OnToology against a set of representative requirements for ontology development support activities in distributed environments, and report on a survey of the system to assess its usefulness and usability.