KAON
| Industry | Software, Ontology framework |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2002 |
| Headquarters | Karlsruhe , Germany |
| Products | KAON, KAON2, OIModeler, KAON Server, TextToOnto, Text2Onto |
KAON (short for Karlsruhe ontology) represents an ontology framework created collaboratively by the University of Karlsruhe and the Research Center for Information Technologies located in Karlsruhe. Introduced in 2002, this platform enhanced support for ontologies based on the RDF. Among its primary components are the graphical ontology editor known as OIModeler and the KAON Server.
Supporting tools designed for ontology learning analyze unannotated natural language texts, including TextToOnto, which is based on KAON, and Text2Onto, built upon KAON2. Notably, Text2Onto incorporates the Probabilistic Ontology Model (POM) to improve its processing capabilities.
The release of KAON2 in 2005 marked a significant advancement by providing efficient reasoning capabilities tailored for OWL ontologies. This version was developed through a collaboration between the Information Process Engineering (IPE) group at FZI, the Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods (AIFB) at the University of Karlsruhe, and the Information Management Group (IMG) from the University of Manchester. It should be noted that KAON2 does not maintain compatibility with its predecessor, KAON.
While KAON, TextToOnto, and Text2Onto are open-source projects implemented in Java, KAON2 is proprietary software; however, its executable file can be downloaded directly from the official KAON2 website.