Investigating Tool Usage in Ontology Engineering: a Survey

Aiming at getting evidence about the use of tools to support OE, we conducted a survey with 74 ontology engineers. We investigated which tools have been used, their main characteristics, benefits and difficulties perceived when using them, and properties considered important in OE tools. The results indicate that tools have been widely adopted, but some issues, such as integration problems and scope limitations, still need to be addressed. This paper presents the survey, its results, and discusses the main findings.

为获取支撑本体工程（Ontology Engineering, OE）的工具应用相关实证依据，我们面向74名本体工程师开展了一项调研。本次调研探究了当前已投入使用的工具类型、其核心特性、使用者在使用过程中感知到的优势与难点，以及本体工程工具中被视作关键的属性指标。调研结果表明，此类工具已得到广泛应用，但集成问题与范围限制等若干挑战仍有待解决。本文将对本次调研及其结果进行详细呈现，并对核心研究发现展开讨论。