Abstract.We have developed an environment for building/using ontologies, named Hozo, based on both of a fundamental consideration of an ontological theory and a methodology of building an ontology. Since Hozo is based on an ontological theory of a role-concept, it can distinguish concepts dependent on particular contexts from so-called basic concepts and contribute to building reusable ontologies.

No abstract

Abstract. This paper describes a system for supporting development of ontology in a distributed manner. By a distributed manner, we mean ontology is divided into several component ontologies, which are developed by different developers in a distributed environment. The target ontology is obtained by compiling the component ontologies. These component ontologies are identified according to their conceptual level or domain characteristics. The distributed development of ontologies applies to many situations such as cooperative development, reusing ontologies and so on. To support such a way of ontology development, we investigate the dependency between component ontologies and design some functions for management of these ontologies based on their dependencies. We next consider the influence of a change of one ontology to others through its dependencies and design a function to suggest a few candidate modifications of the influenced ontology for keeping the consistency. We also present some examples of how the system works.