Overview of PROMPT

The PROMPT tab allows you to manage multiple ontologies in Protégé-2000.
Using PROMPT you can:
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merge two ontologies into one;
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extract a part of an ontology;
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move frames from included to including project;
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compare two versions of the same ontology and create a merged version
Except for move frames, these operations create a copy of the ontology in your
working project and leave the original project intact. In the case of move
frames,
however, both the included and including projects are changed.
Merging ontologies
PROMPT is an interactive ontology-merging tool. It guides you through the
merging process making suggestions, determining conflicts, and proposing
conflict-resolution strategies. The initial suggestions are based on the
linguistic similarity of the frame names. After you select an operation
to perform, PROMPT determines which conflicts in the merged ontology the
operation may have caused and proposes possible solutions to the conflicts.
It then considers the structure of the ontology around the arguments to
the latest operations and proposes other operations that you should
perform. For more information, see Merge Mode.
Extracting a part of an ontology
Sometimes, you may want to save only part of your ontology for various
reasons: to use some subset of the knowledge base in a different project,
to distribute only part of your ontology, to debug a smaller portion of
it, and so on. The PROMPT tab allows you to pick and choose frames and
then copy them into your local project. You can choose a frame and copy
everything related to the frame (the transitive closure of what the frame
refers to, except for the subclasses—otherwise you'll always get the whole
knowledge base). Alternatively, you can copy frames one by one. In that
case, PROMPT will show you the list of referenced frames that you have
not yet copied. For more information, see Extract Mode.
Moving frames from included to including project
Protégé facilitates reuse and development of ontologies through
the project-inclusion mechanism: One project can include one or several
other projects and reuse all frames from the included projects. The
"moving frames" mode of the PROMPT tab allows you to move frames between
projects. You can move the frames from the included project into the including
one, thus altering both. When moving a frame, you can choose everything
that must be moved in order for the projects to remain consistent. An included
project should always stand on its own, therefore, no frame in the included
project should depend on a frame in the including project. You can also
choose to perform the process frame-by-frame. There is a running list of
conflicts to help you sever all the dependencies from included to including project
in the latter mode. For more information, see Moving Frames Mode.
Comparing two versions of the same ontology
This model allows you to compare two different versions of the same ontology. In this
case, the heuristics behind the standard PROMPT merge can be modified. When
the two projects to be merged are known to be different versions of the same
ontology,
Protégé can use stronger heuristics, suggesting, for example, that
a single unmatched sibling of the same parent in the two different versions may
be the same frame with a different name. By concentrating on the differences between two similar projects (rather
than the similarities of two different projects as in merge), compare can give
much better results for the type of reconciliation required in version
control. For more information, see Compare Mode.
Next: Setting Up PROMPT
Prompt Table of Contents