The Protégé Short Course is a hands-on course. To follow is a list of recommended 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. (Please note that we do not provide laptops for participants). We want to avoid holding up sessions for software installation issues. We will be happy to address any difficulties with software installation during the "Getting Started" session, which is held on Monday, March 26th from 2:00-5:00PM.

• Protégé (recommended)
  
  For the March 2007 Short Course, we will be using the Protégé 3.2.1 release, 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 3.2.1 requires JDK 1.5).
  
  Mac Users: Please be aware that you must have Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) to use Protégé 3.2.1.
• Pellet (recommended)
  
  In order to follow along during the Protégé-OWL Advanced Topics & Reasoning session, you will need to install the Pellet OWL DL reasoner. (Please note that if you are an intermediate user of Protégé-OWL and you have already experimented with a different reasoner such as FaCT++, you can use your current reasoner installation rather than Pellet). To install Pellet:
  • Go to the Download section on the Pellet Web site.
  • Download and unzip the Pellet ZIP file to a location of your choice. To follow is a screenshot of what the Pellet installation should look like 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. (Run 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 open the "pizza.owl.pprj" file 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.
  • Choose OWL -> Check consistency... from the menu bar.
  • 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 (recommended)
  
  Jess is a Java-based rule engine and scripting environment that two of Protégé's tab plug-ins depend on:
  • The SWRLJessTab, which will be presented during "The Semantic Web Rule Language" session on Wednesday.
  • The JessTab, which will be presented during the "Ontology Tasks: Reasoning & Scripting Plug-ins" session on Friday.
  Jess must be downloaded separately. For the purposes of this course, we recommend that you simply download the trial version: http://herzberg.ca.sandia.gov/jess/. 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 two subdirectories of your Protégé installation:
  • <your-protege-install-dir>/plugins/edu.stanford.smi.protegex.owl
  • <your-protege-install-dir>/plugins/se.liu.ida.JessTab
• GraphViz (optional)
  
  During the ontology visualization session on Thursday, we plan to demo two visualization plug-ins called Ontoviz and OWLViz (among others). If 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.
  • Configuring Ontoviz - We provide detailed instructions on how to configure 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):
    
    
    
    Please note that neither the Ontoviz nor OWLViz tabs are enabled by default in the Protégé-OWL editor's user interface. Do not be concerned if you do not know how to enable/disable tabs at this point in time. This will be covered during the first two days of the short course and you will be able to make this small adjustment later.