After several extensions and ripping through many different project members the CO-ODE project has finally reached the end (sob).

We think it has been very successful:

• Protege 4 is now in very good shape and is fully released
• Loads of plugins are available and we’ve got some brilliant contributions from the community
• Tutorials shall continue to come out of Manchester on a regular basis
• Protege 4.1 is in its early stages, but already available as a preview to be taken on by Stanford
• Lots of people can now say they are ontology engineers

Thankyou to all the people involved. And thankyou to JISC for funding the project.

Now, I’m off for a break from ontologies for a few months(!)

Nick (and the rest of the former CO-ODE team)

Just catching up after the predictably boiling hot Protege Conference in Amsterdam.

Good to see people (particularly the Stanford Team) showing off all the latest (and craziest) things people are doing with Protege.

Amongst the papers, the two most exciting looking prospects for tools were both from Karlsruhe:

HERAKLES, the reasoner broker framework allows multiple reasoners to be invoked and queried for performance and/or benchmarking.

The database backend for P4 (through the OWL API) based on Hibernate looks like a clean solution that will also give nice performance and hopefully encourage collaborative tool development.

Thankyou to all of the organisers for pulling it off very smoothly.

Amsterdam currently scoring very highly on my conference location top ten.

More than 3 years in the making, Protege 4 is finally released.

Full release announcement here

Thankyou to all our users that have downloaded and worked with the alphas, betas and provided us with feedback.

Thankyou to all the developers that have contributed to the core and the multitude of plugins that are available. Particularly former CO-ODE member Matthew Horridge for not only starting the project, but for continuing to support the critical development of the OWLAPI throughout (even while doing a full time PhD).

And thankyou to JISC who have supported this work on the CO-ODE project.

We hope you are looking forward to the next round of development - P4.1 with even more bells and OWL2 whistles.

Come and say hello at the protege conference next week in Amsterdam.

Nick

Its been a long time since I posted, but that’s because things have been steadily moving on over the last 5 months, bugfixing, minor features and documentation writing.

CO-ODE finally finishes at the end of July. But not until after the Protege Conference which will be happening in beautiful Amsterdam in late June. If you haven’t already signed up then do it now. We will be there doing tutorials on day 1 and generally walking about and seeing what you’ve all been doing with the tools.

The conference allows us one last push before handing over major development of p4 to Stanford and seemed like the best possible time to finally release p4.

So, in order to get the most critical things ready we now have a release candidate available for download. No feature requests please for a month. Let us know the most critical bugs that are causing you problems, or vote to prioritise those already on the list.

And what next? Well, in the meantime the OWL2 spec is finalising allowing the OWL API to harden up. We have already developed a branch of Protege4 (called Protege4.1) on top of the fully OWL2ized OWL API v3. Because of many vocabulary and structural changes the code cannot be made completely backwards compatible, so we will be providing guidance for converting plugin code over the next few months. The codebase is still a little fluid, but developers might want to take an early look. Source can be downloaded, compiled (and run!) from svn. Something to keep you ticking over.

See you in Amsterdam.

 Happy New Year!

To start 2009 we would like to announce the first tutorial of the season.

You can find more details and sign up online at the link below. Places are limited so please sign up early.

http://www.co-ode.org/events/tutorials/intro01-2009/

In the imminent next P4 release I’ve re-enabled auto-update and implemented a plugin registry lookup so you can get downloads right from within P4 without having to google all over the place.

So, to kick this off I’ve been tidying up the CO-ODE plugins and moving them to a new home along with their documentation.

CO-ODE on google code

I hope the changes will make it easier for people to find the tools they need - we’ll see if our downloads go up :) Have a plugin good time.

Just to announce a new plugin that might provide some impetus for people wanting to play with the P4 APIs.Beanshell view provides the user with a console directly in P4 that has access to the OWLModelManager and the OWLEditorKit.This means it is now easy to write some code to query or manipulate the ontology, or even allow the user to manipulate the UI.Download and details

OK, made it to Karlsruhe (a very nice place by first impressions - wish there was as much greenery in Manchester). CO-ODE will be attending the OWL experiences and directions workshop over the next two days.  Looks like a number of very interesting talks will give us some more insight into the user base for P4. 

If you are on the p4-feedback list you will already know this, but as its been a bank holiday in the UK,this is the first chance I’ve had to post the news - because of all the sunshine
Quoting the announcement:

We are very pleased to announce the availability of the first Protege4.0 beta build (download). Please check out a more in-depth beta announcement on our wiki. Release notes for build 100 are available on the main website.

Enjoy it.

Its always important to document as you work, right?

:)We’ve developed a couple more very simple plugins for allowing easier creation and editing of annotations. Plus, the ability to find those annotations again.

The annotate view allows a metadata set to be created and then contributors just fill in the template. So instead of having to “add annotation, select a URI, fill in the values, press OK” you simple Ctrl-Tab down the little form adding the content inline. This should be helpful to those groups that have standards about what should be filled in. We need to put an export/import in for these cases, but release early…

The annotation search view is a simple, global entity annotation value finder. The view lets a user quickly see their “todos” or all comments that mention “marmosets”, or do a regexp search on version numbers in versionInfo or whatever else. We should also be supporting language and datatype filtering for more comprehensive search capability.

Anyway, back to the coding (with plenty of comments of course).