[protege-discussion] Java Program

[Jennifer Vendetti]

Taylor,

Taylor Cowan wrote:
> I recomend you abondon the Protege model and use the OWL plugin...I really don't know why they keep the standard Protege model around.
It is certainly true that OWL has advantages because it is a W3C 
standard and there are other software tools that you can use to interact 
with OWL besides Protege.  However, there are a number of reasons why we 
have no plans to abandon the Protege-Frames editor.  Protege-Frames 
existed long before OWL and we have an obligation to support the portion 
of our user community that develops frame-based ontologies.  Also, as 
you mention below, the Protege-OWL editor's user interface is more 
complicated than the frame-based one.  Some people prefer to use 
Protege-Frames to do things like acquire instance data, and then export 
their knowledge-bases into OWL periodically.

There was a presentation at the last Protege Conference that goes into 
much more detail about the advantages and disadvantages of Frames and 
OWL.  You may find the slides interesting:

http://protege.stanford.edu/conference/2006/submissions/slides/7.2wang_protege2006.pdf
> The advantage is that you can autogenerate a user friendly Java api from the OWL project, or even use external OWL friendly tools
> to access your ontology (Jena).
You can auto-generate Java code from Protege-Frames ontologies using the 
JSave application, which can be found in the following directory:

<protege-install-dir>/applications/jsave

JSave is documented on our Wiki:

http://protege.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?JSave
> The only problem with the OWL plugin is that the UI is needlessly complex.  Although I'm familiar with editing ontologies in standard Protege, when I moved to OWL I was lost for days.
If you have concrete suggestions about how to simplify the user 
interface, feel free to post them on the protege-owl mailing list and we 
can enter them as enhancement requests in Bugzilla.  It is hard for us 
to improve the application w/out having specific descriptions from users 
of what works and what doesn't work.
> I wished Protege supported the standard UI, with OWL in the background.
>   
The Protege-OWL FAQ page has a question/answer set that addresses this.  
Among other things, you can use the Protege-Frames editor and export to 
OWL when necessary:

http://protege.stanford.edu/doc/owl-faq.html#look_and_feel

Jennifer