Initializing the Prompt Tab

Once you have enabled your project to use the Prompt tab, you can compare, merge, or extract projects and move frames between projects by initializing the tab. If you are moving frames from an included to an including project, the projects are not changed at this point; however, both projects will be altered later, when you actually save the working project after you have moved selected frames.

To initialize PROMPT:

  1. If you have created a new project, and you have not yet saved it, save it before you initialize PROMPT. This will tell PROMPT where to store its log. 
  2. Click the Prompt tab. If the Prompt Tab displays a window with subtabs and options, then it has already been initialized. If the Prompt tab does not appear, you need to enable PROMPT in your project first. See Enabling the Prompt Tab for more information.
  3. Choose what you would like to do from the list of options
  4. Select the desired operation from the pull down menu:
  5. Click the button(s) to select the file(s) you want to use. For merge modes, you need to select two files. For compare, extract and move frames modes, you need to select one file. See the descriptions of each mode for more information.
  6. To help you keep track of your ontologies, PROMPT attaches a suffix to each frame in the projects you pull in in some of the modes. This suffix, the "Alias", that indicates the source project of the frame. By default, it is usually the name of the original project, except in the case of compare, where the two files are called "old" and "new".  To edit this suffix, simply edit the text in the Alias entry box. Note that once you have finished making all the changes in your project, you can remove suffixes using the Prompt menu.
  7. If you are merging large ontologies (several thousand frames each), you can disable the Compare sources option. Normally, if you have selected merge, Protégé will load all the frames from both ontologies into your working memory. For most merges, this default behavior is  the best option. However, if the original ontologies are extremely large, this can be very expensive, consuming a lot of resources. You can limit the scope of the merge by deselecting the Compare sources option. This option is valuable if Protégé hangs during your merge.
  8. Once you have made all your selections, click OK to initialize PROMPT. 

Once PROMPT has been initialized, Protégé loads the appropriate information from the source files and prepares its suggestions. The Prompt tab changes to reflect the choices you made during initialization.


Next: Merge Mode

Prompt Table of Contents