Natural language processing provides a very significant contribution to various application areas such as multilingual big data, information retrieval, data integration and multilingual web. However, handling linguistic knowledge to develop such lingware applications is a crucial issue, especially for linguistic novice users. To deal with this issue, a "smart" linguistic knowledge management may help the users to understand the meaning, scope and especially the use of related techniques and algorithms. In this paper, (1) we propose a semantic processing of linguistic knowledge based on a multilingual linguistic domain ontology, called LingOnto. Compared to related work, LingOnto does not only handles linguistic data, but also linguistic processing functionalities and linguistic processing features. Besides, it allows, via a reasoning engine, inferring new linguistic knowledge and assisting in the process of proposing lingware applications. This is particularly useful for novice users, but can also provide new perspectives for the expert ones. LingOnto covers the French, English and Arabic languages. (2) We propose also an assisted user friendly ontology visualization tool called LingGraph. It facilitates the interaction with LingOnto. It offers an easy to use interface for users not familiar with ontologies. It is based on a SPARQL pattern-based approach to allow a smart search interaction functionality to visualize only the ontological view corresponding to the user’s needs and preferences. In order to evaluate LingOnto, we apply it to a framework of identifying valid natural language processing pipelines. Finally, we give the results of the carried-out experiments.