SymOntoX: a Web-ontology tool for ebusiness domains

Ontologies are emerging as a key solution to allow different applications to exchange information in a cooperative business environment. From the technology point of view, the growth of the Internet and the Web has favoured the exchange of information and documents among people, but unfortunately the same is not true when information is exchanged among software applications. To tackle the latter problem, ontology-based approaches are among the most promising ones. This is one of the reasons of the momentum that ontologies, and consequently ontology management systems (OMSs), are witnessing. An OMS represents a powerful tool to create common and shareable knowledge repositories concerning a given application domain. The goal of this work is to present SymOntoX, a Web-based OMS conceived for the ebusiness domain. It is an open source software system supporting collaborative and distributed ontology authoring activities.