Hozo : Environment for building ontology

The goal of this research is to develop a computer environment supporting building and using of ontologies. We consider that the process of building of an ontology consists of the following five steps;

1. To clarify the scope and the objectives of the ontology
2. To get the knowledge sources (documents)
3. To analyze and organize the knowledge
4. To describe an ontology
5. To evaluate the ontology

The current research aims include to develop the following two subsystems;

• A guide system supporting the 3rd step
• An editor system for ontologies for the 4th step.

The former is mainly designed to support the building of domain ontologies initially from the documents. This system is based on the ontology building methodology called AFM (Activity-First Method) where task analysis helps the ontology authors to limit and simplify the domain concepts.

The later system enables us to browse and edit the ontologies in the ontology server through the network using the web browsers.