A Tool for Working with Web Ontologies

Abstract

The task of building an open and scalable ontology browsing and editing tool based on OWL, the first standardized Web-oriented ontology language, requires the rethinking of critical user interface and ontological engineering issues. In this article, we describe Swoop, a browser and editor specifically tailored to OWL ontologies. Taking a “Web view” of things has proven quite instructive, and we discuss some insights into Web ontologies that we gained through our experience with Swoop, including issues related to the display, navigation, editing, and collaborative annotation of OWL ontological data.