Ontology Tools

A good article, Ontology Building: A Survey of Editing Tools [Nov. 06, 2002] found via Melissa Riesland’s post to sigia-l. The table that outlines each tool and its features is worthy of publication alone.

So, I’ve been wondering, what would you use these ontology tools for if you weren’t creating a topic map? And when is a topic map not the instantiation of an ontology? I was reminded of my continued befuddlement when I realized that this article doesn’t mention the phrase “topic map.”

Update: Victor writes, “an ontology might be instantiated as RDF, for example. There you’re not creating topics and mapping them to resources, but instead you’re tagging the resources as having certain attributes. Through inheritance some simple tags can have significance for a resource’s role in the larger resource space. Conceptually it can still add up to an ontology.”