RubyForge Project Started

April 26, 2006 by slholmes
Filed under: General 
I have started a new project at RubyForge. The project is called Protege+OWL+Ruby. It’s a slightly lofty name, I’m sure, maybe even a little pretentious. But after working with my new system (see previous post), I could see where it would be quite easy to create a full JRuby IDE using Protege as the user interface.

The code I have creates a nice set of classes that wrap around OWL individuals defined in protege. There is a general routine called 
create_ind(ind)
that returns an object representing an individual with properties that reflect the OWL class of the individual. For instance in my example ontology:

load 'project'
maj2nd = create_ind("Interval_Maj2nd")
p maj2nd.hasNotation #-> images/intmaj2nd.png
p maj2nd.class #-> Interval
p maj2nd.methods(nil)


The result of the last statement from above is a listing of the methods available to the OWL individual:

["isAlsoDiminished", "rdfs_label", "is_it_safe", "hasInversion", "hasResolve", "looksLike", "hasNotationDim", "rdfs_comment", "isAlsoAugmented", "hasNotationAug", "hasNotation", "hasWidth"]


See the method 
is_it_safe
in the method list above? This method was implemented with code entered into the OWL ontology (using the imported POR ontology) as an individual of 
por:InstanceMethod
which is basically just a wrapper around an 
xsd:String
property. I created an individual of 
Interval
and hooked that to the OWL class 
rdfs:isDefinedBy
by adding an existing resource as an annotation in the Protege OWLClasses tab. The annotation property is a 
. I’m pretty sure I’m in the ball park as far as the recommendation goes from the W3C. Using this annotation property this way is still OWL-DL as far as I can tell and does not cause Protege to declare the ontology OWL-FULL.

Annotating the OWL ontology with Ruby code this way starts making Protege feel exactly like a really sophisticated IDE. I can change the body of the method using the Protege user interface. To test my changes I simply issue a command or two in the Protege Script Tab. It’s the most natural way to develop I’ve encountered. A nice little map of all the Ruby classes and properties and data wrapped up with a great little IRB.

All that’s needed is a juicy little debugger, some syntax coloring and (maybe one day) autocomplete.

]]>

				
		
		
		

			
Tags: , , , ,  

		

					
				
		
Comments

		





			

	 



Feel free to leave a comment... 
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!