Overview of the NeOn Toolkit

Abstract

The NeOn Toolkit is one of the major results of the NeOn project. It is a state-of-the-art, open-source, multiplatform ontology engineering environment, which provides comprehensive support for the ontology engineering life cycle of networked ontologies. It is based on an open and modular plugin architecture that allows adding additional plugins realizing more advanced features supporting more complex ontology engineering activities. A substantial number of plugins have been developed within and outside the NeOn consortium and are available at the NeOn Toolkit homepage. The NeOn Toolkit supports the Web Ontology Language OWL 2, the ontology language specified by the W3C, and features basic editing and visualization functionality. Its user interface, especially the presentation of class restrictions, makes the NeOn Toolkit accessible to users that do not have long experience with ontologies but instead know the object-oriented modeling paradigm. In the chapter, we will present the feature set of the NeOn Toolkit and how to use it. A second part explains some architecture and implementation background and how new plugins can be integrated into the common platform.