What is an ontology management system?
An ontology management system for ontology is equivalent to a database management system (DBMS) for data. A DBMS allows an application to externalize the storing and processing of data, via a standard interface, and relieves the program from the burden of deciding how to store the data in files, how to index the data, how to optimized queries, how to retrieve query results, etc. In a similar way, an ontology management system allows an application to manipulate and query ontology without one having to worry about how the ontology is stored and accessed, how queries are processed, how query results are retrieved, etc., by providing a programming interface. Ontology editing capabilities are not viewed as the critical component of an ontology management system. An ontology management system may or may not provide the ontology editing and designing capabilities. In case it does not, an ontology management system can be used in connection with an ontology editor such as Protg, if necessary.
