Design of an ontology management framework

This paper presents design of an ontology management framework that supports management of the ontology development process. A distinguishing feature of the proposed framework is the central role occupied by the property of monotonicity, which supports addition but not deletion of knowledge into an ontology. The framework supports object-oriented representation of knowledge, versioning control, ontology product lines and security of ontologies. It is part of an evolving infrastructure for supporting knowledge reuse and ontology construction for knowledge-based system development. The framework is currently being developed in a client server environment. With the ontology management system, an ontology developer can focus on the conceptualization and ontology modeling of a problem domain, assured that the management and administration of the modeling process will be automatically supported. In this paper, details on design considerations for the components of the management framework are discussed.