FW: Protege-2000 1.7 Release

Forwarded in case anyone's interested - Protege is an ontology tool backed
by RDF (or RDBMS). It's pretty sophisticated (though lacked support for Bags
last time I looked), and can be extended with plugins - the GraphViz plugin
is a must.

---
Danny Ayers
<stuff> http://www.isacat.net </stuff>





We are pleased to announce the release of Protege-2000, version 1.7.  See
below for a complete list of enhancements and bug fixes included in our
latest release.

Navigate here for the latest version:
http://protege.stanford.edu/download/release/install.htm

Navigate here to download and try out a number of interesting new plug-ins
in our plug-ins library:
http://protege.stanford.edu/plugins.html

Best Regards,
The Protege Team

Enhancements:
----------------------
1).  A new "Welcome Dialog" is available when you launch Protege.  Users can
quickly open a new project, reopen a project from a most recently used list,
or click one of several help buttons to access our User's Guide, FAQ, and
tutorials.  You can turn off the "Welcome Dialog" if so desired on the
Project->Configure...->Options tab.

2).  The Project menu contains a new menu item called "Open Recent" which
displays a list of the most recently used projects.

3).  You can now run Protege from the command line using the command:
java -jar protege.jar.

4).  Form customizations of a class are now automatically "inherited" by
subclasses. Previously you had to do a manual "customize subclasses" step
with the consequence that your .pprj file could become quite large. This is
no longer necessary. Instead the "customize subclass" right mouse item has
been replaced with "remove subclass customizations".

5).  The RDF backend now supports user defined facets as well as preserving
"yellow stickies" and pal constraints.

6).  For the JDBC backend there is now a way to specify the string used to
create the LONGVARCHAR data type. Previously the system queried the driver
and used the data type name in a CREATE TABLE call. Some systems (DB2)
require a size for this parameter and the only way to get protege to work
with these databases was to recompile the source. Now the entire datatype
name can now be specified as the value for a java property
"SimpleJdbcDatabaseManager.longvarcharname". The best way to set this
variable is by setting the corresponding value in the protege.lax file. Note
that you do not need to use this for most database systems.

7).  The template slots widget now sorts template slots differently.
Previously all slots on a class appeared alphabetically. Now the direct
slots appear first and inherited slots follow, grouped by class, as you walk
up the class hierarchy. Slots are no longer sorted alphabetically, even
within a group. The template slots widget can be customized to display arrow
buttons that allow you to change the order of slots.

8).  The Help menu in Protege is now much more helpful.  Updated the Help ->
FAQ menu item to point to the FAQ on our Web site rather than a page that
said "to be written". Also changed the text to "Frequently Asked Questions"
for the purpose of clarity.  Deleted the Help -> Shortcuts menu item which
displayed an HTML page that said "to be written".

9).  Updated installer to now include a step which allows you to select the
VM that you want to use. This is of use to those who download the "without
VM" versions of Protege.

10).  You can now pass a URL for a project into Protege on the command line.

11).  Generate HTML now can optionally produce HTML documentation for
instances. (Special thanks goes to Robert Voorn for contributing this code).

12).  Modified javadoc generation so that it links back to the JDK API
documentation on the javasoft web site.  Added javadoc documentation to the
obscure model.ValueType class methods and some of the more obscure KB
methods.

14). Changed some Query tab default sizes so the default layout is nicer on
small screens.

15).  There is a new method on ProjectManager that allows you to keep the VM
from exiting when you close the Protege application.

16).  The browser text for slots is now used more consistently in the UI in
place of the slot name.

17).  The "About box" now credits Protege Affiliates and funding agencies.

18).  The Clips backend now supports class names that contain an internal
single quote character. (Names may not start with such a character however).

19).  Users can now set the slot maximum cardinality to zero. Note that the
API method KnowledgeBase.getMaximumCardinality() now returns -1 if the
maximum cardinality is not set (previously it returned 0).

20).  The value-type widget no longer accepts symbol allowed-values with
spaces. These were never legal values but the widget previously allowed
them.

21).  Set the "contextClassLoader" in the SystemUtilities static initializer
to be the class loader that knows how to load from the plugins directory.
This will usually result in the "main" thread having its contextClassLoader
set to this value.

22).  Added a method SystemUtilities.getDefaultClassLoader() method to
return the plugins directory classloader.

23).  Added index on JDBC backend database table for Oracle in order to
improve performance of case-insensitive search.


Plug-in Enhancements:
---------------------------------
1).  Removed built-in XML parser from rdf-api.jar and configured the system
to use the Xerces XML parser (version 1.4.4).

2).  Modified the XML DTD and XML Schema backends in the plug-ins library so
that they both use the same version of the Xerces XML parser. Repackaged
these XML backends so that Xerces is an external JAR rather than included in
the backend JAR.

3).  Added some missing class to the PAL distribution. PAL now comes as two
jar files that need to go into the plugins directory: pal.jar and antlr.jar.

4).  Added hook to several widgets to enable tab widgets to capture the
"double click" operation.


Bug Fixes:
---------------
Removed references to missing tabs at project load time. This also results
in only "real" tabs showing up in the Project | Configure dialog.

Fixed incorrect error message in "Warnings" panel on InstanceRowWidget.

InstanceTableWidget and InstanceRowWidget no longer allow you to delete
instances from included projects.

Fixed a long standing problem that caused the database back-end to sometimes
print out "duplicate frame id" error messages after the user creates frames.
Thanks go to Daniel Rubin for providing a reproducible test case for this
problem.

Fixed a performance problem in the database back-end when talking
specifically to Oracle RDBMS.

Incorporated a fix from Michael Sintek for the RDF back-end concerning
references to slots in included projects.

Fixed problem that caused FormsTab to not update when forms are changed
programmatically.

Fixed a regression in the clips parser that caused exceptions when double
quote characters were encountered in frame names.

The "standard text" (clips) backend now accepts unicode escape sequences.
This change addresses the problem that caused load-time failures with error
messages that look like
Lexical error at line N, column M. Encountered: "\u2019" ...

Fixed bug that caused the clips backend to incorrectly handle strings which
terminate in a "\".

Fixed a bug that allowed a user to change the override of facets on included
classes.

Fixed a bug that caused hidden classes from included projects to behave
incorrectly.

Fixed a bug that caused cardinality multiple template slot values to
multiply like rabbits in instances.

Removed dead code that supported a very old version of the RDF backend.

The database backend now works correctly with MS Access again.

The Windows "Look and Feel" now displays included classes in the classes
tree more clearly.

The Welcome Dialog now remembers the opened project if you exit Protege by
closing the console window.

The "New" button on the "Welcome Dialog" now works correctly.

Removed some unused menu items and tool bar buttons.

Fixed the "Project | Include" menu item which did not result in included
projects being set up correctly. (This wasn't a problem for previously
included projects, just new ones.)

Fixed a problem wherein the project files grew without bound with each save.

Fixed a problem wherein setting a template slot value for a slot would cause
existing own slot values for that slot to not be displayed
anymore. -------------------------------------------------------------------
--- To unsubscribe, send email to majordomo@smi.stanford.edu with
"unsubscribe protege-users" in the message body (no quotes). If this doesn't
work, contact owner-protege-users@smi.stanford.edu

Received on Thursday, 11 April 2002 15:59:35 UTC