The Chimaera Ontology Environment

Abstract

Ontologies have become central components in many applications including search, e-commerce, configuration and, arguably, every large web site (at least for organization and navigation). As ontologies become larger, more distributed, and longer-lived, the need for ontology creation and maintenance environments grows. In our work with ontologies and tool environments over the last few years, we have observed growing needs for automated support of two tasks: (1) merging multiple ontologies and (2) diagnosing (and evolving) ontologies. Chimaera is an ontology tool environment aimed supporting these two tasks.