Abstract

To complement existing ontology editors, OntoXpl has been designed and implemented for searching and browsing knowledge bases in ontology files. The main motivation for OntoXpl is to provide a user-friendly, robust, and scalable ontology visualization and exploration tool for different users. The idea is to help users narrow down the knowledge base, for a given query, retrieve the relevant information, organize, and display the result in a manner convenient to users. The system relies on Racer's inference capabilities for offering users a better exploration mechanism. OntoXpl is based on the tomcat architecture and is available on the web, through standard HTML browsers. OntoXpl is one of the few ontology exploration tools developed so far that is fully targeted to OWL. At least three potential user groups are targeted by OntoXpl's design: (i) users with a limited background of ontologies and OWL; (ii) ontology developers who are OWL experts; (iii) users interested in understanding and reusing existing ontologies.