RE: DAML+OIL editors

> From: Michael Denny [mailto:mike.denny@aviex.net]
> While several editors like Protégé 2000 (with the OIL 
> plugin), OilEd and
> OntoEdit seem to be available with some maturity, I am 
> floundering in trying
> to gauge how complete their support of the spec really is.  
> Can anyone offer
> an opinion as to which most fully exploits the DAML+OIL 
> representation, or where I might encounter deficiencies.
[...]
> I understand that all these tools are
> evolving quickly, and accept that any answer may be fleeting. 

I've used all three, but I have to declare some bias in that I used to work
at University of Manchester and I'm working on a rebuild of Ian Horrocks'
work :-).  With that warning, here goes.

Protege-2000 (late 1.6 beta; I've not downloaded the full 1.6 release) is
the most mature editing environment, but has significant shortcomings when
used with description logics.  In particular, it currently has no support
for negation ('not'), none for disjunction ('or') and no way of building
complex but unnamed fillers for slots.  It will not become a DAML+OIL editor
without a considerable amount of work, both bodging negation and disjunction
in as facets and then writing new tab and slot widgets to hide the bodges.

OilEd is designed, as Sean Bechhofer says, as 'the Notepad of the DL editor
world'.  It is not a full editing environment, and is rough round the edges.
Sean's recently added support for namespaces, and the tool supports almost
the entire DAML+OIL spec.  It doesn't have full XML datatype support (but
then, what does? :-).  It also has the cleanest integration with a reasoner,
IMHO.  I don't like some of its user interface much; too many clicks per
concept, but it's difficult to see how to fix this and still provide the
power it does.

I've not looked at Ontoedit for some time; the last was the update to 1.0
they put out some months ago.  It's the only editor to allow multilingual
concept names.  Last I looked, it was relatively small, simple and very much
designed for frame editing, with the same expressive shortcomings as
Protege.  I know the team at Karlsruhe has released a new version that
allows plug-ins; evaluating it is one of the many things on my To Do list.

		- Peter
--
Peter Crowther, VP Development, Network Inference Limited

Received on Wednesday, 24 October 2001 03:46:55 UTC