Ontology Building: A Survey of Editing Tools

Editor's Note: An update to this article has been posted here on 7/14/04. As the hype of past decades fades, the current heir to the artificial intelligence legacy may well be ontologies. Evolving from semantic network notions, modern ontologies are proving quite useful. And they are doing so without relying on the jumble of rule-based techniques common in earlier knowledge representation efforts. These structured depictions or models of known (and accepted) facts are being built today to make a number of applications more capable of handling complex and disparate information. They appear most effective when the semantic distinctions that humans take for granted are crucial to the application's purpose.