As applications of the Semantic Web proliferate, tools for efficient management of Semantic Web information become ever more important. The primary goal of such tools is to enable management of metadata according to specifications of Semantic Web languages, such as RDF(S) or OWL. However, to apply these tools in the usual corporate setting, many secondary issues are pushed into foreground. In deed, the capabilities such as dealing with large quantities of information, persisting ontologies and metadata and providing concurrent access to them are increasingly determining the success or failure of projects that try to apply Semantic Web technologies.

KAON is an ontology management tool suite developed at the AIFB and FZI at the University of Karlsruhe that tries to address both goals. It consists of the following components:

• RDF(S)-based ontology model with some adaptations and extensions (such as transitive, symmetric and inverse properties),
• API for management, persistence and modularization of ontologies and metadata,
• Support for evolution of (distributed) ontologies,
• Query processing module for executing DL-like queries,
• OI-modeler - a powerful GUI application for ontology management,
• KAON Portal - a Web-based interface for presentation of semi-automatic generation of ontology-based Web portals.

To achieve the above mentioned secondary goals, the persistence and inference mechanisms of KAON are based on relational databases, thus making realization of concurrency and scalability easier.

In the demonstration at the conference we'd like to demonstrate how KAON tools cover the full ontology lifecycle, from its creation, metadata generation, querying and evolution.

This talk is entended for everybody who is trying to apply Semantic Web technologies and is interested in evaluating available tools.