OntoEdit: Guiding Ontology Development by Methodology and Inferencing

Ontologies now play an important role for many knowledge-intensive applications for which they provide a source of precisely defined terms. The terms are used for concise communication across people and applications. OntoEdit is an ontology editor that has been developed keeping five main objectives in mind: 1. Ease of use. 2. Methodology-guided development of ontologies. 3. Ontology development with help of inferencing. 4. Development of ontology axioms. 5. Extensibility through plug-in structure. This paper is about the first four of these items.