|
What is Orient?
ORIENT (Ontology engineeRIng ENvironmenT) is a project that
develops an Eclipse-based
integrated ontology engineering environment that supports various tasks
in ontology engineering including but not limitted to ontology
building, mapping, evolution, evaluation and visualization. ORIENT
supports industry ontology standards such as RDF(S) and OWL and it also try to be
integrated with other modelling formalism and tools such as EMF and UML.
The current release is 0.1.1.
|
|
How
to download/install Orient?
Before you can install Orient, you need a Eclipse platform
(build 2.1.1 or later, but not 3.0) installed on your machine first. If
you do not have one, you can download it from the Eclipse official site.
There are two ways to download and install Orient.
One is using the Eclipse update manager. Switch to the Install/Update
perspective in Eclipse, add the Orient Eclipse update site: http://apex.sjtu.edu.cn/projects/orient/eclipseupdate
to the site bookmarks. Then choose install Orient and follow the
instructions.
Note: There will be a warning during the installation
process saying that "You are about to install an unsigned feature.".
You can just ignore it and click Install to continue.
If you have problems using Eclipse update manager, you can
download the needed jar files directly from the Downloads
section. Then, extract all the plugin jar archives into folders
with the same name as the jar files respectively, inside the
eclipse/plugins directory. Finally, extract the feature jar archive
into a folder with the same name as the jar file inside the
eclipse/features directory. This way, the next time when you start the
Eclipse platform, you will see a "Configuration Changes" dialog. Check
if the Orient is in the changes list, then click finish to complete the
install.
|
|
How can I
import/export the ontology from/to an RDF file?
First, open or create an ontology file. Then, select
import/export from the file menu, and choose "Ontology in RDF File".
Then, select the RDF file you'd like to import/export.
Note: Importing an RDF file won't lead to cleaning the
current ontology first. Instead, the importer will add the contents in
the RDF file to the current ontology.
|
|
How to
RDF(S) entailment with Orient?
Orient provides two modes of RDF(S) entailment. One is
real-time mode and the other is passive mode. When you open or create
an ontology file, the Orient is in passive mode at first. In this mode,
RDF entailments won't be done until you click the inference button in
the tools bar. After the inference process is completed, you can see
all the entailment results in the views as well as the original ones.
You can switch Orient into real-time inference mode by clicking the
real-time inference button beside the inference button. When real-time
inference mode is selected, Orient will do a full inference first if
the current ontology is "inference dirty". After that, whenever you
add/delete/update items in the views, real-time inference will be done
automatically to keep the inference results up to date. Please note
that in some special situations, doing real-time inference when some
items are deleted will cost lots of time, even longer than the time
that is needed to do a full inference again. In these cases, please use
the passive inference mode instead when deleting these items and switch
to real-time mode again when you complete deleting. This problem will
probably be solved in future releases.
|
|
The
inference/real-time/refresh button is disabled. Why?
In the current release of Orient, the
inference/real-time/refresh button is enabled only when the ontology
editor(that is, the useless seemed view on the upper right corner of
Orient perspective) is selected as the active view. This problem will
probably be solved in future releases
|
|
I deleted
an item in the resource/class/property list but it appears again when
the views are refreshed. Why?
The items listed in these views contain both the original
items created by user and the items created from entailment. But, only
the items created by user can be deleted purposely. So, if you are
trying to delete an item which is created from entailment, the delete
operate will actually do nothing and thus you will see the item again
when the view is refreshed.
|
|
How to
configure the database parameters when I create an ontology file?
First, select the database you'd like to use. Currently,
Orient supports using HypersonicSQL
or DB2 Universal
Database Version 8.1 as the underlying database.
If you choose to use the HypersonicSQL as the underlying
database, all you have to do is specify a path in the file system to
store the HypersonicSQL data files. For example, if you use the path C:/test/orient
, then two files named C:/test/orient.script and C:/test/orient.properties
will be created. And, during the use of the database, another temporary
file named C:/test/orient.data will be created. You can use a
relative path instead of an absolute path if you wish.
If you choose to use the DB2 Universal Database, you should
have access to a DB2 server first. Also, a database must be created on
the DB2 server for the Orient to store the ontology data. You can also
use an existing database if you wish. You can refer to here for the details on how to
setup the DB2 database to meet the requirements of Orient. Then, if you
have a DB2 client installed on your machine, you can choose the DB2
Type2 driver. Otherwise, you can only use the DB2 Type4 driver.
About the rest of the parameters:
- Database Name: This is the name of the database you'd
like to use. For DB2 Type2 driver, input the local alias for the
database. For DB2 Type4 driver, you should include the domain name,
port and the database name in the input. For example, if the database
name is orient, the DB2 server is on local machine and the default port
is used, the input will look like //localhost:50000/orient .
- User Name: This is the user name which will be used to
connect to the DB2 server. The provided user account should have the
rights to create tables and do query/update on the created tables. The
password of the given user will be asked when Orient is actually trying
to connect to the DB2 server.
- Schema: This is the database schema with which Orient
will create the tables. You can store many different ontologies in a
same database with different schemas.
Note: If you give same database parameters(including
the schema setting in the DB2) to several different ontology files,
these files will actually share the same database, and thus have the
same ontology contents. Also, delete an ontology file will not delete
the data in the database as well.
|
|
How to launch the visualzation view for an ontology?
Open the visualzation view via the toolbar button.
Click 'train SOM' to train the SOM network for the highlighted ontology (The ontology must have at least two classes in order to train a SOM network). Click up-arrow and
down-arrow button to switch among different kinds of images. Once the ontology is edited, please close and reopen the visualization view to redraw the image.
|
| กก |
