Developing Ontology Based Applications with O3L

Ontologies have been gaining interest and their use has been spreading in different applications fields. However, their use in the realization of applications might be further increased by the availability of more usable and efficient software library for the management of ontologies. In this paper, an object-oriented software library for the management of OWL ontologies is presented. This software library, called O3L (Object-Oriented Ontology Library), provides a complete representation of ontologies compliant with OWL 2 W3C. O3L has not the goal to be use for the creation and manipulation of ontologies, but provides a simplified and efficient API for the realization of applications, that interoperate through the use of shared ontologies, and allows: i) the use of OWL individuals as data of the applications, ii) the exchange of OWL individuals between applications, iii) the reasoning about OWL individuals, and iv) the classification of OWL classes and properties. This software library has been experimented in the realization of some e-business applications showing both high effortlessness in the development of the applications and high performances in their execution.