[protege-discussion] Beginners list?

[Jonathan Carter]

Hi Fieran,

I've spent some time looking at Prompt - which is a powerful tab.
I did find that I had to do quite a bit of trial and error to  
understand what was going on. However, the documentation, although  
based on a previous version, is relevant and helps give you the basics  
for how to approach Prompt.
The thing that really came clear to me is that there are different  
options in Prompt for tackling different problems when working with  
ontologies. In the end, the DIFF option was what I needed to clearly  
see the difference between 2 projects with the really nice feature of  
being able to selectively move things from one project to another,  
classes and instances. All graphical and very nice.
For what I was trying to achieve, the project merging options were not  
quite doing what I wanted. Depending on the size of the projects you  
are working with, Prompt takes a while (and a lot of resource) to run.  
It's performing some complex activities for you.

I'd recommend starting with the DIFF option to analyse your projects  
and from there you can think about whether merging is going to work,  
for example, with Prompt.

Having another look at the problem that you're working with it's not a  
straight forward mapping in Prompt to take classes and convert them  
into instances and vice versa.
One approach worth considering is that used in some application  
integration scenarios, and define some intermediary ontology to which  
you can map each of the ontologies, rather than directly mapping them  
to each other.

However, the fact that the ontologies have taken very different  
approaches to defining the meta model (one says class, one says  
instance), I think may still cause problems with an intermediary  
ontology using Prompt. If you can clearly define the mapping though,  
e.g. on paper, so that you accurately understand how these ontologies  
map, then you use the script tab to programmatically morph, e.g.  
classes of one into instances of the other. I use this sort of  
approach quite a lot for doing things like importing information into  
my ontology from external data sources.

Hope this helps.
__________________________________________
Jonathan Carter - Head of Technical Architecture
Enterprise Architecture Solutions Ltd
__________________________________________

Assess your EA maturity at:
www.enterprise-architecture.com/EAvaluator
__________________________________________

On 30 Oct 2008, at 23:58, Fieran Mason-Blakley wrote:

> Hello forum,
>
> Struggling with Prompt right now and seeing unexpected behaviour -  
> protege becomes semi responsive when I try the mapping option.  I  
> was hoping there was a beginners forum where I could post my silly  
> questions.  I try to read documentation but often find that it  
> doesn't match my version.
>
> thanks
> Fieran
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