Catalysoft   Turtle
home products articles about us contact us

Recent Articles

What's Good About Clojure?

Clojure is a relatively new language to appear on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), although it draws on very mature roots in the form of the LISP langu ...

Should You Care About Requirements Engineering?

Recently, I (Adil) was invited to participate in a one day seminar on the subject of Requirements Engineering. Whilst I have no direct experience of t ...

Tips for Setting Up Your First Business Website

To attract all potential customers to your business you need a presence on the web. The problem is that if you haven't set up a website before, you p ...

What's Good about LISP?

LISP is a general-purpose programming language and is the second-oldest programming language still in use, but how much do you know about it? Did you ...

Open Source Tools for Developers: Why They Matter

From a developer's point of view use of open-source tools has advantages beyond the obvious economic ones. With the open-source database MySQL in mind ...

Protege Units Support

Background

Information Systems and the ontologies that specify their concepts should explicitly represent units, so that their 'unitized values' can be machine-processed for conversion and comparison. We believe the representation should also be extensible so that units can easily be inserted or modified without the need to rebuild the system from source code.

We present our plug-in Protege Units, which is reusable, flexible and extensible. It is reusable because it extends the system classes of Protege Frames and provides a domain-independent abstraction upon which other ontologies can be built. It is flexible because the concepts used to support measurement units are represented as a mini-ontology within Protege's own framework, rather than being hidden away in Protege's application code. Therefore the relationships between concepts in the user's own ontology and units can be explicitly represented. It is extensible because it enables users to insert both units and dimensions at run-time, as well as to configure their unit-conversion factors. This allows users to specify unusual or custom measures, such as the foaminess of a detergent or the peatiness of a whisky.

Who should use Protege Units?

This product is aimed primarily at Protege users. If you have an interest in measurement units but are not a Protege user you will also find it helpful, but will have to spend some time learning about Protege first.

What Next?

Download the plugin, try it out and please give us some feedback on your success with it.

Instructions on how to use the plugin, as well as a video demonstration, are provided with the download.


Simon White