These tools can be used for a great range of activities in the ontology development process, such as ontology design, browsing and implementation, ontology importation, ontology merge and alignment, and ontology-based resource annotation. The middle tier is based on an application server, which makes it easy to create and add new services. A wide range of services for importing and exporting ontologies are available, as we describe in the next section, and some other services rely on them. WAB) to edit formal axioms and rules. Bibliographic references, synonyms, and acronyms can be attached to any of the aforementioned ontology components.

WEBODE is a scalable workbench for ontological engineering that eases the design, development, and management of ontologies and includes middleware services to aid in the integration of ontologies into real-world applications. WEBODE presents a framework to integrate new ontology-based tools and services, where developers only worry about the new logic they want to provide on top of the knowledge stored in their ontologies.