Automatic generation of ontology editors

Metalevel tools can support the knowledge-engineering process by assisting developers in the design and implementation of domain-oriented knowledge-acquisition tools. The use of ontologies as a basis for automatic generation of knowledge-acquisition tools simplifies the tool-specification process by taking advantage of ontologies defined as part of the knowledge-engineering process.
One of the drawbacks of this approach is that it separates ontology definition (in ontology editors) from instance editing (in knowledge-acquisition tools). Because many application tasks require ontology definition by domain experts, we have experimented with extending the Prot´eg´e framework to generate ontology editors in addition to knowledge acquisition tools for instances. We have explored different approaches to ontology-editors pecification in a series of prototype extensions to Prot´eg´e. Here, meta class and meta slot definitions are the basis for ontology editors, which can be embedded in knowledge acquisition tools and can be used by domain experts.