MarBlog

Ontology Part2: Homing in

by on Sep.15, 2010, under Data Management, Software

After trying out a few ontology tools, I am slowly settling on Protege which seems to have a decent mixture of straight forward entity building with additional support for tracking object properties, data properties and individuals associated with classed . Given that this exercise is primarily about building a catalogue of activities whereby data from several underlying systems can be identified based on the relative ease with which it can be expanded is important.

Most of the ontology tools I have looked at are java based. This of course have the advantage of making them more distributable across operating systems, but can also have some quite severe memory implications – but so far Protege seems to work well without any signs of slowdowns.

In addition there are a number of plug-ins, which I am just starting to look into, but the ability to create forms based on the data definitions using the frames extension seems promising.

So at least for now, Protege seems like the choice for building a relatively simple ontology while keeping it scalable with the possibility of associating data directly.

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2 Comments for this entry

  • Bradley Shoebottom
    September 16th, 2010 on 2:44 pm

    I have used Protege, but i find Top Quadrants’, TopBraid Composer-Meastro edition (http://www.topquadrant.com/products/TB_Composer.html) to be much more powerful. It comes with a personal server that allows you to view/manipulate/add-to/and query your ontology in a html browser. The actual app is a desktop app with the same capabilites. It is pricy though, running you about $2000 for the Maestro edition. TopBraid recommends 4 GB of memory and we did have to increase our Java Heap space.

    Reply
  • JR
    September 16th, 2010 on 6:55 pm

    I have to admit that it looks very capable indeed! But the price tag would be a bit preventative in some ways, but i did notice they do have a free edition as well. However the features of being able to drop directly into database is appealing – almost enough to pay the extra :-)
    Thanks for your feedback – Although I’m impressed with Protege so far, I’m always willing to look at other products as its still early days in the actual build!

    Reply

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