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GrOWL is currently used as the primary knowledge browser in all user-end applications developed at the Ecoinformatics Collaboratory, such as the Ecosystem Services Database. The editor is being tested for classroom use and for collaborative development of domain ontologies in the context of projects in Ecological Economics and Agriculture.

GrOWL is open source and freely available, so it's hard to keep track of what people do with it. We have heard from people who find it a great aid for presenting ontologies to audiences. Please feel free to send feedback on what you do or would like to do with GrOWL.

GrOWL is gearing up to become the primary knowledge explorer tool within the Kepler project. The knowledge explorer will assist the process of semantically annotating data and processing steps in scientific workflow. In order to make this process as easy as possible, we are extending GrOWL with many features, such as textual search for concepts and synonims. The development of these features is being done under the sponsoring of the SEEK project.

The availability of filtering and graphical extensions (see above) will open the door to the use of the GrOWL editor as a generic graphical modelling tool. By defining symbols corresponding to instances of complex concepts, we will be able to load an entire modelling environment as a collection of new concepts and symbols. Users will then be able to model with familiar abstractions, the way they're used to using tools like Stella or Simulink, but output fully consistent ontologies that can later be processed into working models or workflows. Our Integrating Modelling Architecture, which works directly with ontologies to enable users to define natural system entities, can be the middleware that operates this translation. We ultimately aim to provide a fully integrated, seamlessly operating system based on GrOWL for the user side and the IMA on the server side.