P4MoveAxioms

Refactor | Copy/move/delete axioms...

This feature will be updated in release 105. This page describes the new functionality.

Back to Protege 4.0 refactor menu

Refactor | Copy/move/delete axioms...

A set of axioms can be extracted from an ontology and optionally moved to another ontology. Selection can be made by several different algorithms.

• Select the menu Refactor | Copy/move/extract axioms...
• A wizard will guide you through the process which involves the following steps:
  • Select ontology choose which of the loaded ontologies you wish to move axioms from
  • Select method different ways of selecting the axioms you wish to move (see screenshot and below for a description)
  • There will then be one or more screens (dependent on the method) by which you can select a set of axioms
  • Copy, move or delete axioms decide what you want to do with the selected axioms
    • Selecting copy or move allows you to select a target ontology:
      • Select target ontology choose whether the target ontology is one already loaded or if a new ontology is to be created.
      • You will then go through the steps to pick or create an ontology
    • Selecting delete will then allow the wizard to end
• Press OK

The ontology into which the axioms were moved should now become active to allow you to browse the changes.

You can undo the entire operation with a single Edit | Undo.

Axiom Selection Methods

Axiom selection methods are pluggable. The default ones available are:

Axioms by profile

This method allows P4 to compute the axioms that are allowed within a particular fragment (a subset of the expressivity) of the OWL language.

For more information see the w3c note on OWL profiles

The current profiles supported are:

• OWL2 (useful for finding combinations of axioms that are invalid - eg use of non-simple properties in cardinality restrictions)
• OWL DL (useful for retaining backwards compatibility with OWL1 tools)
• EL++ (fragment for efficient classification of very large ontologies)

Axioms by reference

This method allows the user to select a signature (a set of classes, properties and individuals) and then computes all of the axioms that reference entities in the signature.

Note that if you are moving these axioms to another ontology you will end up with additional entities not mentioned in the signature (any that are also referenced by the selected axioms).

In the first page, select the entities you are interested in in the left pane and click the button to add them to the right.

In the second page you can see a preview of which axioms are included as you confirm your choices on the left.

Axioms by type

This method allows the user to select the types of axiom that will be moved.

For example, you might want to move all your annotations to another ontology (or delete them all).

Or perhaps you want to move everything about object properties to another ontology.

In the first page you can select multiple axiom types and move them to the right pane using the button in the middle.

In the second page you will see a preview of the axioms that are selected - untick individual axioms to remove them from the selection.