CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Ontology authoring, maintenance, and use are never easy tasks, mostly due to the complexity of real domains and how they dynamically change as well asdifferent background possessed by modelers about methodologies and formal languages. However, although the needs for ontologies are well-understood, not less important is to provide editing tools to manipulate and understand them. In this context, this work proposes and documents a reference architecture for such tools running in web environments. Moreover, it provides the rationale for boosting the collaborative development of a novel tool based on this architecture, named crowd. Previous surveys reveal that few Web-based ontology engineering environments have been developed and in addition, almost all of them are mere visualizers, with limited graphical features and lacking inference services.