I spent a couple of hours this evening learning the basics of the Protege API. It’s pretty easy to read in an ontology and read out or create new parts of it. But now I have to figure out how to take specific evaluated service parameters and create new named classes and individuals from them in the ontology. If I can do that, I will have some real results to show. Well, maybe not “real” results, but certainly some intermediate results.

There are a few display issues I’ll have to work on, but they shouldn’t be an issue. The issue is digging through all of the documentation to figure out how to suppress (or eliminate) the excess text that gets appended to the class names. that may or may work; there are still gaps in the Protege documentation. I spent an hour finding out why the I was getting an error that OntologyLoadException couldn’t resolve. I made sure I was importing all the jar files the programmer’s guide said should be imported, but they neglected to mention that protege.jar from the main Protege directory needed to be imported as well. Perhaps the computer science types who are creating Protege at Stanford should team up with some folks from the humanities majors to check their documentation. Just a thought.