Reusable ontologies are becoming increasingly important for tasks such as information integration, knowledge-level interoperation and knowledge-base development. We have developed a set of tools and services to support the process of achieving consensus on commonly shared ontologies by geographically distributed groups. These tools make use of the World Wide Web to enable wide access and provide users with the ability to publish, browse, create and edit ontologies stored on an ontology server . Users can quickly assemble a new ontology from a library of modules. We discuss how our system was constructed, how it exploits existing protocols and browsing tools, and our experience supporting hundreds of users. We describe applications using our tools to achieve consensus on ontologies and to integrate information. The Ontolingua Server may be accessed through the URL http://ontolingua.stanford.edu

We show how to deliver a sophisticated, yet intuitive, interactive application over the web using off-the-shelf web browsers as the interaction medium.This attracts a large user community, improves the rate of user acceptance, and avoids many of the pitfalls of software distribution.Web delivery imposes a novel set of constraints on user interface design.We outline the tradeoffs in this design space, motivate the choices necessary to deliver an application, and detail the lessons learned in the process.These issues are crucial because the growing popularity of the web guarantees that software delivery over the web will become ever more wide-spread.