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.

为获取支持本体工程（Ontology Engineering, OE）的工具使用相关实证依据，我们对74名本体工程师开展了一项调研。本次调研探究了当前已被使用的工具类型、工具的核心特性、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为至关重要的各项属性。调研结果显示，此类工具已得到广泛应用，但集成问题、范围限制等若干问题仍有待解决。本文详述了本次调研的实施过程与结果，并对核心研究发现展开了讨论。