This paper presents design of an ontology management framework
that supports management of the ontology development process. A
distinguishing feature of the proposed framework is the central role
occupied by the property of monotonicity, which supports addition but
not deletion of knowledge into an ontology. The framework supports
object-oriented representation of knowledge, versioning control, ontology
product lines and security of ontologies. It is part of an evolving
infrastructure for supporting knowledge reuse and ontology construction
for knowledge-based system development. The framework
is currently being developed in a client server environment. With
the ontology management system, an ontology developer can focus
on the conceptualization and ontology modeling of a problem domain,
assured that the management and administration of the modeling process
will be automatically supported. In this paper, details on design
considerations for the components of the management framework are
discussed.