Support for Protege 4.x?

Post Reply
rquinn
Posts: 3
Joined: 26 Jan 2011, 14:41

Sorry if this question has been asked before. Searching for "Protege 4.x" or "Protege latest version" are invalid searches because the words are too common.

Anyway I'm wondering about plans for 4.x / OWL support.

We currently run 4.x for data management metadata ontologies, we support and had thought about possibility of integrating the two initiatives.

Really looking forward to checking out essential. It looks really interesting.

thanks!
User avatar
jonathan.carter
Posts: 1087
Joined: 04 Feb 2009, 15:44

At the moment, we are waiting for Protege 4.x to add some key capabilities that are currently only available in Protege 3.4.x

This means that at the moment, Protege 4 is not supported and will not work with the Essential ontologies and toolset.

I think it's worth pointing out that although Protege 4 is in common use, Protege 3 is still an active product - something that I confirmed with the Protege team a little while ago.

The key capabilities of Protege 3 that are missing from Protege 4 are:

- Multi-user support (that is multiple users working on the ontology concurrently)
- Database backend (we recommend this for large ontologies with thousands of instances)
- Support for Frames based ontologies

Even though this means that you cannot simply extend your current ontology to use the Essential stuff, it is certainly possible to integrate the ontologies - either using your existing ontology as a data source to import into the Essential repository or vice versa. We can talk about how to achieve this.

Hope this helps

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
rquinn
Posts: 3
Joined: 26 Jan 2011, 14:41

Thanks for the reply.

Agree that 3.x is a going concern and viable. I understand the need for that 4.x to support DB and be multi-user.

Is OWL support on your road map?

I know there are differences between OWL and Frames syntax, approach and capabilities so understand it's not trivial.

RDF tools seem to be expanding at a rapid rate.

Thanks.

Robert
User avatar
jonathan.carter
Posts: 1087
Joined: 04 Feb 2009, 15:44

Hi Robert,

I wrote about OWL in our blog fairly recently - it's definitely an FAQ.

We took a conscious decision not to use it when we started the Project a number of years ago and we felt that a Frames-based knowledge base supported what we were trying to do better. That's not to say that you couldn't use OWL to represent the ontology that is created as you model in Essential Architecture Manager. In fact, Protege can export the Essential ontology to OWL format and to RDF, so this helps a lot if you need to export the contents of your ontology to RDF tools.

Protege is hard to beat, though, in terms of usability, for building your ontology!

I'd be interested in your views - especially as you've been working in Protege 4 - on what I've said in the blog post.

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
rquinn
Posts: 3
Joined: 26 Jan 2011, 14:41

Jonathan,

The blog covers it.

Also I better appreciate the intent of essential... create instances not classes. that is right on.

I haven't used the export to OWL, but I'll investigate.

I needed a better sense of your OWL support, so I can talk through with my client (they're OWL oriented :)

Anyway I hope we continue with essential and I'm able to contribute to it.

Thanks again.

Robert
Post Reply