Tutorial: Getting Started with Protege-Frames
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Developing an Example
Suppose we want to develop a system that helps manage the costs and organization of a newspaper. The "examples/newspaper" subfolder of the Protege installation directory contains a completed Protege-Frames project, newspaper, which provides one possible ontology for this domain. Some of the questions we want to answer are: Once we have an idea of what we want to cover, we can list some of the important terms we need. These can include basic concepts, properties they might have, or relationships between them. To begin with we can just collect the terms without regard to the role they might play in the ontology.

In the newspaper example we have sections. Each section contains content such as articles and advertisements and has a editor who is responsible for the section. Each article has an author, and that author may or may not be an employee. For each employee, we want to know his or her name and salary, and who he or she reports to.

As we continue to generate terms, we are implicitly defining the scope of our ontology, by what we finally decide to include and what to exclude. For example, upon initial examination of the term employee, we might want to add janitor or delivery truck driver. However, on reflection, we might realize that we want our ontology to focus on the costs directly associated with the content generation and presentation of the newspaper. Therefore, we would decide not to include janitor as a term of interest.

When we have a fairly complete list, we can start to categorize the different terms according to their function in the ontology. Concepts that are objects, such as article or author, are likely to be best represented by classes. Properties of the classes, such as content or salary, can be represented by slots, and restrictions on properties or relationships between classes and or slots, are represented by slot facets.

We will now dive in and show how to use the Protege-Frames interface to create and structure these components of the ontology.