tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9025880770474050744.post-50003969398099551552008-03-29T08:07:00.000-07:002008-03-29T08:45:33.921-07:00I installed <a href="http://protege.stanford.edu/" target="new">Protégé</a> version 4 alpha last night and it has been solid for me so far. It has been over a year since I upgraded my local Protégé installation, and I like these (new ?) features a lot:<ul><li>Saved XML for OWL ontologies is very readable, with good automatically generated comments and a nice layout</li><li>Use of the <a href="http://owlapi.sourceforge.net/" target="new">Java OWL API</a></li><li>Both Fact++ (using JNI) and Pellet 1.5 are smoothly integrated</li><li>The Owlviz Plug-in seems to display graphs faster</li><li>Drag and drop can be used rearrange class hierarchies</li></ul>I have started working again on an old <a href="http://knowledgebooks.com" target="new">KnowledgeBooks</a> project: an OWL ontology for news stories and associated "Semantic Scrappers" to populate the ontology from plain texts of news stories. I am still in the experimentation stage for the semantic scrapper: I am trying to decide between pure Ruby code, Java using the available OWL APIs, or a combination of JRuby and the Java OWL APIs. I am currently playing with these three options - for now, I am in no hurry to choose a single option. Using a dynamic language like Ruby has a lot of advantages as far as generating "OWL classes" automatically from an ontology, etc. That said, the Java language has the best semantic web tools and libraries.<br /><br />Long term, I would like a semi-automatic tool for populating ontologies via custom scrapper libraries. I say "semi-automatic" because it would be useful to integrate with Protégé for manual editing and browsing, while supporting external applications accessing data read-only (?) via the Java OWL APIs.Mark Watson, author and consultanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05514730816583918651noreply@blogger.com