OntoViz

OntoViz

by Michael Sintek

Screenshot

Type	Tab Widget
Author(s)	Michael Sintek
Last Update	July 11, 2007
License	Mozilla Public License.
Homepage	not available
For Application	Protege-Frames Protege-OWL Protege Client-Server
Topic(s)	Visualization
Affiliation	Stanford University

Edit this plugin

The OntoViz Tab allows you to visualize Protege ontologies with the help of a highly sophisticated graph visualization software called "Graphviz" from AT&T.

Versions & Compatibility

This section lists available versions of OntoViz.

Version	Compatible with	Dependencies
OntoViz 1.0	Protege-Frames 3.4 Protege-OWL 3.4 Protege-Frames 3.3.1 Protege-OWL 3.3.1 Protege-Frames 3.2.1 Protege-OWL 3.2.1

If you click on the button below to add a new version of OntoViz, you will be asked to define a page title for the new version. Please adhere to the naming convention of OntoViz X.X.X when you define the new page!

Add New Version

Changelog

Version	Changes in this version
OntoViz 1.0	no release notes were maintained for this version

Detailed Description

The OntoViz Tab allows you to visualize Protege ontologies with the help of a highly sophisticated graph visualization software called Graphviz from AT&T. The types of visualizations are highly configurable and include:

• Picking a set of classes or instances to visualize part of an ontology
• Displaying slots and slot edges
• Specifying colors for nodes and edges.
• When picking only a few classes or instances, you can apply various closure operators (e.g., subclasses, superclasses) to visualize their vicinity.

Installation

The OntoViz Tab is bundled with the "full" installation of Protege (please use version 3.3.1 or 3.4).

Once you have installed Protege, you must also:

a). Install the appropriate version of the Graphviz graph visualization software for your platform.

b). Modify your "protege.properties" file to specify where you installed Graphviz. For example, if you installed Graphviz in C:\Program Files\ATT\Graphviz\, you would add the following line to protege.properties:

dot.command=C\:\\Program\ Files\\ATT\Graphviz\\bin\\dot

The protege.properties file is located in the root directory of your Protege installation and an example protege.properties file is included in the OntoViz subdirectory for your reference

<protege-install-dir>/plugins/dfki.protege.ontoviz/protege.properties

In addition to specifying the path to the Graphviz dot executable, you can set the following optional attributes:

dot.font=<font-name> (optional; usually Arial)

dot.fontsize=<size-specification> (optional; usually -2 or -3)

dot.fontpath=<path-to-ttf-directory> (needed on some flavors of Unix; on Solaris: /usr/openwin/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType)

Mac specific notes on installation

Many thanks go to Andy Spydell for providing the following Macintosh specific instructions for configuring OntoViz and Graphviz. Andy used Mac OS X (10.4):

Download the latest Mac OS X version of Graphviz (current is 1.13 v16). I chose the disk image version (dmg) version. Upon extracting and mounting, you will find two files contained within the disk image: Graphviz (an Application) and an Examples directory.

Create a directory to hold the Graphviz application and Examples directory at a location of your choice (for example, I created a directory called /Users/andy/Developer/Tools/Graphviz). The disk image is named something like "Graphviz 1.13 (v16)", which makes a poor directory name due to the spaces, period, and parentheses.

Copy the Graphviz application and Examples directory into your newly created directory.

In the Finder, locate the file named "protege.properties" in the Protege directory, and open it with TextEdit (right-click, open, other, select TextEdit). You need to add a line to the file that tells Protege where to find the Graphviz UNIX executable. For me, the line of text looks exactly like:

dot.command=/Users/andy/Developer/Tools/Graphviz/Graphviz.app/Contents/MacOS/dot

Save and close TextEdit.

Comment from another Mac user: these instructions did not work for me. I added the following property to the protege.properties Property Table (accessible from the File | Preferences... | Property Files tab):

Property = OWLViz.Dot.Path, Value = full path name of location of dot executable

Then it worked for me.

If you don't see any graphs after you begin using the OntoViz Tab in Protege, verify that the dot.command value does in fact represent the "dot" UNIX executable. The easiest way to do this is with the Terminal and "ls" command. Copy the dot.command value from the protege.properties file and paste it into a Terminal window:

terminal> ls /Users/andy/Developer/Tools/Graphviz/Graphviz.app/Contents/MacOS/dot

If the file is not found, you will then need to correct the path value in protege.properties.

Documentation

You can find more information here