The Protégé-OWL Short Course is a "hands-on" course. The purpose of this Web page is to give course participants detailed instruction for installing the required and optional software components that we will use during the course.

** We highly recommend to participants that you install this software on your laptops before the start of the course in order to avoid holding up sessions for software installation issues. Please note that we do not provide laptops for participants. **


Quick Links: Protege | Pellet | Jess | Graphviz




Protégé (required)

For the March 2008 Protégé-OWL Short Course, we will use Protégé version 3.4 beta (build 128 or higher), which can be downloaded from the Protégé Web site. Please download the "full" version of Protégé, which includes many plug-ins that will be demonstrated during the course.

We also prefer that you check the "Include VM in download" option before launching the install process to ensure that a Java Virtual Machine is installed. Alternatively, if you already have a 1.5 version of the JVM installed on your laptop, you may point Protégé to your JVM on the "Choose Java VM" screen during the install process (Protégé 3.4 beta requires JDK 1.5).

Mac Users: Please be aware that you must have Mac OS X 10.4 or higher to use Protégé 3.4 beta.


Pellet (required)

In order to follow along during the "Protégé-OWL Advanced Topics & Reasoning" session, you need to install the "Pellet" OWL DL reasoner. (Please note: if you are an intermediate user of Protégé-OWL and you have already experimented with a different reasoner such as FaCT++, you may use your current reasoner installation rather than Pellet). To install Pellet:

• Go to the download section of the Pellet Web site (the most current version of Pellet is 1.5.1).
• Download and unzip the Pellet ZIP file to a location of your choice. To follow is an example of how the Pellet installation looks on a Windows system after unzipping the file:
  
  

After installing Pellet, we recommend that you perform the following test to make sure that Pellet and the Protégé-OWL editor are communicating properly:

• Launch Pellet's DIG server by running the pellet-dig.bat batch file on Windows systems or the pellet-dig.sh file on Unix-like systems. To follow is a screenshot of the DIG server running on a Windows system:
  
  
  
  
• Launch Protégé and select the "pizza.owl.pprj" file in the Welcome to Protégé dialog:
  
  
  
  Click the Open Recent button to open the example "Pizza" project. If you are an intermediate user of Protégé and the Pizza project is not in your list of recently opened files, you may dismiss the welcome dialog and use the File | Open... menu item to open the project, which is located in <your-protege-install-dir>/examples/pizza/.
• Open the OWL Preferences dialog by choosing OWL | Preferences... from the menu bar.
• In the Reasoning section of the General tab, enter http://localhost:8081 as the Reasoner URL. To follow is a screenshot of the OWL Preferences dialog with the proper value entered into the Reasoner URL text area:
  
  
  
  
• Click Close to dismiss the OWL Preferences dialog.
• Click the "Reasoning" menu item and make sure that the "DIG Reasoner" option is selected:
  
  
  
  
• Once you have ensured that the DIG Reasoner option in selected, choose Check consistency... (also under the Reasoning menu item).
• If Pellet has been properly installed and the Protégé-OWL editor properly configured, you will see a dialog with a title that includes the text "Connected to Pellet...", and Protégé-OWL will have performed a consistency check of the pizza ontology:
  
  
  
  

Jess (required)

Jess is a Java-based rule engine and scripting environment that the SWRLJessTab depends on. The SWRLJessTab is a Protégé-OWL plug-in that will be presented during "The Semantic Web Rule Language" session on Wednesday.

Jess must be downloaded separately. For the purposes of this course, we recommend that you simply download the trial version from the Jess Web site. After you have downloaded and unzipped the Jess ZIP file to a location of your choice, click on the lib directory to locate the jess.jar file. Copy the jess.jar file and paste it into the following subdirectory of your Protégé installation:

<your-protege-install-dir>/plugins/edu.stanford.smi.protegex.owl


Graphviz (optional)

During the ontology visualization session on Tuesday, we plan to demo two visualization plug-ins called Ontoviz and OWLViz (among others). Please note that participants are not expected to follow along with the demos. However, if you think you would like to experiment with either plug-in, you need to install a 3rd-party drawing library that is required by both plug-ins called "Graphviz" from AT&T Research. Please refer to the Graphviz Web site to download and install their software.

After you have installed Graphviz, there are some additional configuration steps that are necessary. As mentioned above, performing these steps are only necessary if you would like to "play around" with these plug-ins at any time during the course.

Neither the Ontoviz nor OWLViz tabs are enabled by default in the Protégé-OWL editor's user interface. To enable the tabs, open any Protégé-OWL project (like the example "Pizza" project - pizza.owl.pprj) and choose the Project | Configure... menu option to bring up the Configure dialog. On the TabWidgets tab, check the boxes next to OntovizTab and OWLVizTab and click the OK button. Both tabs will now appear in the user interface.

• Configuring Ontoviz - We provide detailed instructions for configuring Ontoviz on the Protégé Wiki.
• Configuring OWLViz - If you did not install Graphviz in the default location (/usr/local/bin for Mac OS X, Linux, and Unix, or C:\Program Files\ATT\Graphviz\bin for Windows), you need to tell OWLViz where to find it. This can be done from the OWLViz options dialog (click the Options button on the OWLViz toolbar):
  
  
  
  If you have any difficuties configuring the OWLViz plug-in, please refer to the "Troubleshooting" section towards the bottom of the OWLViz Wiki page.