Today, Altova, the makers of the well known XML Spy editor, announced SemanticWorks 2006:

Altova SemanticWorks™ 2006 is the ground-breaking visual RDF/OWL editor from the creators of XMLSpy. Visually design Semantic Web instance documents, vocabularies, and ontologies then output them in either RDF/XML or N-triples formats. SemanticWorks™ 2006 makes the job easy with tabs for instances, properties, classes, etc., context-sensitive entry helpers, and automatic format checking. It is the sensible way to put the Semantic Web to work for you.

The product is visually very similar to the rest of the Altova suite, and come with a price tag of 199 Euros. Some considerations:

• Semantic web products are crossing the academic research boundary, and starting to become mainstream across the industry. Until now, the only available ontology editors were those created by academic labs (such as Protégé and SWOOP), or those bundled with knowledge-management platforms (such as Autonomy's and Verity's).
• 'Ontologist' is becoming a real-world job title. Some of my friends works as ontologists in a private company, here in Italy.
• I am not so sure that working with ontologies will be related to directly working at the OWL and RDF level. Those are complex, low level languages, and I expect that the users will be more interested in higher-level editors, that will produce OWL/RDF as an automated step of a more complex deployment process.