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As is known in the human-computer interaction (HCI) domain, interactions involve the user, the technology, and the ways they work together. We expand these notions to human-ontology interaction with the aim to investigate how users interact with the networked ontologies in a realistic ontology lifecycle. In this paper, we describe a user study that we have carried out in order to improve our understanding of the level of support provided by current ontology engineering tools in the context envisaged by the NeOn project. That is, in a scenario when ontology engineers are developing complex ontologies by reuse, ie, by integrating existing semantic resources. Some work on evaluating tools for ontology engineering has been done in the past. In [2] authors conclude that the tools available in the time of their study (cca 1999) were little more than research prototypes with significant problems in their user interfaces. These included too many options for visualizing ontologies, which tended to confuse the user and hinder navigation. Moreover, the systems’ feedback was found to be poor, which meant a steep learning curve for non-expert users. Finally, most tools provided little support for raising the level of abstraction in the modelling process and expected the user to be proficient in low-level formalisms. Work described in [8] evaluated Protégé in several tasks, from the perspective of a power user. The authors found the system intuitive for expert knowledge engineers, as long as operations were triggered by them (eg knowledge re-arrangement). However, difficulties arose when assistance from the tool was expected; eg in inference or consistency …