[protege-discussion] DataMaster - mapping columns to class members

[Csongor Nyulas]

Hi Paul,

See my answer below.
>
> Hello Csongor
>
> Ok, your method (b) works, I have put in practice. Thanks you very much. Now I 
> get the instances imported in the right place and with some little editing 
> work I can bring back the classes of my ontology to their original namespace. 
> The method applies also to the property of classes, with some extra 
> complication however: In fact a direct object properties is correctly imported 
> in the ontology, but there is no way to obtain its inverse property. Yes, I 
> could create the inverse property later, but then I had to fill the slots 
> manually.
>   

The good news is that is possible to create inverse properties with 
DataMaster. You don't have to specify any extra options, just make sure 
that you have n:m relationships defined  between some of your tables in 
the database by the means of a properly defined "bridge table". The 
requirement are described on the wikipage of DataMaster's predecessor, 
DataGenie
    http://protege.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?DataGenie
Check out the "Automatic handling of bridge tables" point in the 
Documentation section.

> One additional desired feature of your method would be to assign to the 
> imported instances a name  extracted from a specific column of the database, 
> can you figure how to do that?
>
> Thanks again 
> Paul
>   
Instance names are automatically generated based on the table name, and 
there is no user option to influence it in DataMaster. We thought this 
should be OK in most of the cases, because the names of the instances 
should not carry any meaningfull information. The OWL recommendation 
specifies that the rdfs:label property should be used to define user 
readable names for OWL individuals. You can also use other custom 
defined properties to represent instance names, and you can set Protege 
(using the "Display Slot" in the Forms tab) to generate the browser text 
of your instance based on your preferred property/properties.
You can also write a small script in the ProtegeScriptTab[1] to copy the 
values of your preferred columns in rdfs:label or the custom property 
you want to use to represent the name of your instances.

I hope this helps.

Regards,
Csongor

[1] http://protege.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ProtegeScriptTab