[protege-discussion] Can I use my own database tables?

[Jennifer Vendetti]

Fred,

Fred wrote:
> I'm new to Protege. We have quite a few Oracle database tables used by our proprietary Taxonomy appliation and other applications. We are thinking of migrating to Protege. Besides the Protege, our other applications will still need the access to these tables.  I have a few questions:
>
> 1.  Can we still use our own tables in Protege for our ontology contents?  
Protege uses its own database format, described here: 
http://protege.stanford.edu/doc/design/jdbc_backend.html. 

If you don't want to use the Protege database back-end, you can write 
"import" and "export" plug-ins that import & export your taxonomy to & 
from Protege into your own tables.

> 2. If we can, how can we access the content of these tables? Do we use APIs, PlugIns, or somthing else?
>   
A common thing that people do is to use Protege as an editor and then 
periodically export snapshots of their ontologies/taxonomies into their 
own proprietary database tables.  The best way to do this is to write an 
export plug-in, documented here:

http://protege.stanford.edu/doc/pdk/plugins/export_plugin.html

There are examples of export plug-ins in our source code repository.  
You might look at the HTML export plug-in:

http://smi-protege.stanford.edu/svn/standard-extensions/trunk/src/edu/stanford/smi/protegex/export/html/

Of course, you will also need to do an initial import of your data into 
Protege.  You can either write an import plug-in (a.k.a. "createproject" 
plug-in), documented here:

http://protege.stanford.edu/doc/pdk/plugins/createproject_plugin.html

Or, you could try using the DataGenie plug-in to import your data.  This 
is a plug-in that allows you to import data from arbitrary databases 
into Protege.  It may or may not produce a result that you would like to 
move forward with:

http://protege.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?DataGenie

Jennifer