EKAW Tutorial: Introduction to Ontology Development and the Protégé-OWL Environment
Date: TBA (conference 5th-8th October 2004)
Speakers: Alan Rector, Nick Drummond, Matthew Horridge, Robert Stevens, Hai Wang
Duration: Half Day with extensive hands on experience and pre- and post- material
Goals
The major goal of this tutorial is to provide the attendees with both the theoretical foundations of ontology design and hands-on experience in the construction of ontologies with Protégé-OWL environment. In particular, the attendees will
- Learn the basic principles and application domains of OWL based ontologies using styles developed at Manchester and in the Semantic Web Best Practice Working Party.
- Gain hands-on experience with ontology development using the Protégé-OWL tools
- Learn how to use the expressive power of OWL and to take advantage of its inferencing capabilities
- Evaluate the Protégé-OWL tools and related plugins in the context of the state-of-the-art in ontology engineering, Web-based ontology representation languages and related tools.
- Be introduced to the skills needed to participate in the growing community of user/developers of the environment
- Protégé v2.1 - ontology editing environment
- Protégé OWL plugin
- RACER - a reasoner
- OWLViz - a Protégé plugin for displaying graphs
- OWL Wizard - a Protégé plugin
Please follow the steps below to install the software.
Software installation
Getting and installing Protége:- Download Protégé v2.1 from the Protégé download page. If you do not already have java installed on your machine, make sure you get a version including the Java VM
- Make sure all previous versions of Protégé are removed
- When downloaded, start the installer
- When prompted, choose a Custom install (where you will be able to select installed components)
- Ensure you select the Semantic Web component set
- Start Protégé
- Select "OWL Files" in the Project Format box
- To start an empty OWL project, press "New",
or to use an existing OWL file (like the demo files), press "Build..." and enter (or search for) the OWL filename
- A reasoner must be running before the "Classify" or "Check consistency" buttons can be used, otherwise an error will be generated
- Download the RACER zip file
- Extract the executable to somewhere sensible
- Run the executable - which should provide a message saying "TCP service enabled on port 8088"
- The "Classify taxonomy" and "Check consistency" buttons can now be used
- Download GraphViz - required libraries
- Components (like OWLViz) are on tabs that need to be activated, so go to the Project Menu, Configure...
- In the Tab Widgets tab, select "OWLVizTab"
- Select OK
- The OWLViz Tab should be visible in the main window
Example pizza ontologies used in the course are available for download.
Nearer the time, we will "lock" the versions of the software we will be using and bundle these together as a zip file to ensure everyone has the same features and that we can take advantage of the most up-to-date software. Please bookmark this page and return closer to the tutorial date.
Reference Materials
Because of the amount of material to cover it is recommended
that you familiarise yourself with the look and feel of the tools.
The Protégé OWL tutorial [PDF] provides
a look at the majority of the features that will be used during the session.
Some of the experiences of previous tutorials have been worked into a paper which will be
presented at EKAW. This provides a greater level of detail into the pitfalls of
modelling to support participants after the conference.
OWL Pizzas: Common errors & common patterns from practical experience of teaching OWL-DL
[PDF]
