XDTools

XDTools

The eXtreme Design tools for NeOn toolkit (XD Tools) offers the possibility to perform operations on ontology design patterns (ODPs) according to the eXtreme Design (XD) methods. For further details we refer to D2.5.2, "Pattern based ontology design: methodology and software support". The concept of networked ontology is native in XD. The main idea is to provide the user with pattern-based operations, such as specialisation, composition, instantiation, according to the guidelines defined in D2.5.1 in the context of the XD methodology. The tool provides a perspective - “eXtreme Design” - that groups all the user components: the ODP Registry browser and ODP Details view, the XD Selector, and the XD Analyzer. Other components can be activated in several ways within the interface, i.e. the XD Specialization Wizard, the XD Annotation dialog and the XD Analyzer.

• ODP Registry and ODP Details view: through this view users can have access to a set of reusable OWL patterns that can be directly browsed and exploited in the modelling process, without necessarily having them locally stored. When a pattern is selected from the registry tree, all OWL annotations are visualised in the ODP Details view;
• XD Selector: The aim is to give support to the end-user with a component for proposing patterns to be reused to cover requirements expressed as competency questions. The user can query these basic selection services providing either simple keywords or a complete competency question (CQ). The XD Selector view displays as result a list of proposed ODPs to be reused in the current working ontology. By click on a result, details (ontology annotations) are shown in the ODP Details view.
• Specialization Wizard: The Specialization wizard is the component provided by XD Tools for guiding the user in the specialisation of Content ODPs. The wizard can be accessed either from the Navigation view, i.e. through the contextual menu activated while right-clicking on an ontology, from the ODP Registry view or from XD Selector’s results view. When the process is finalised, a message is displayed with the option to open the dialog for ontology annotation, i.e. to annotate the new ontology module that has been created.
• XD Annotation dialog: It provides the facility to annotate the ontology using other vocabularies in addition to the annotation properties already provided by OWL/RDF. For the Content ODPs the CPAn-notationSchema[1] is supported[2]
• XD Analyzer: The aim of this tool is to provide suggestions and feedback to the user with respect to how good practices in ontology design have been followed, according to the XD methodology (for instance missing labels and comments, isolated entities, unused imported ontologies).

For more detailed information about functionalities, architecture and extendibility we refer to D2.5.2. The XD Tools supports the following activities according to the NeOn methodologies:

• Ontology Annotation and Ontology Documentation: the XD Annotation Dialog provides facility for annotating ontology patterns. This task is particularly important for Content ODPs, since the annotations are the base documentation provided to the user.
• Ontology Reuse: ontology design patterns can be accessed from the ODP Registry view and reused by cloning locally (the ’get’ button in the user interface) and by specialisation (through the ’Specialization Wizard’);
• Ontology Selection: ODPs exposed in the ODP Registry can be selected through the XD Selector component, that allows a quick search functionality and support multiple selection services.
• Ontology Diagnosis: the XD Analyzer provides end-user support for good practices in pattern based ontology design.

[1] Published at http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/schemas/cpannotationschema.owl

[2] Ongoing work includes to support the possibility to add additional, user-defined, vocabularies through a preference page.