Category: Concepts, Trends, and Challenges

Ontologies play a key role in realizing the full power of etechnology. Ontologies allow for machine-understandable semantics of data, and facilitate the search, exchange, and integration of knowledge for B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer) e-commerce. Ontology is defined as the specification of shared knowledge (Waterson & Preece, 1999). By using semantic data, the usability of e-technology can be facilitated. There are several languages like XML (extensible markup language), RDF (resource description framework), RDFS (RDF schema), DAML+OIL (DARPA Markup Language+Web Ontology Language), and OWL. Many tools have been developed for implementing metadata of ontologies using these languages. However, current tools have problems with interoperation and collaboration. The primary goal of this survey is to introduce and understand several tools through their use. Therefore, we can develop a new generation of tools that not only support more capabilities, but also solve the problems of current tools.