Lifecycle-Support In Architectures For Ontology-Based Information Systems

Ontology-based applications play an increasingly important role in the public and corporate Semantic Web. While today there exist a range of tools and technologies to support specific ontology engineering and management activities, architectural design guidelines for building ontology-based applications are missing. In this paper, we present an architecture for ontology-based applications-covering the complete ontology-lifecycle-that is intended to support software engineers in designing and developing ontology-based applications. We illustrate the use of the architecture in a concrete case study using the NeOn toolkit as one implementation of the architecture.