Difference between revisions of "Graph Widget Upgrade from 3.3 to 3.4"

Revision as of 15:40, June 8, 2009

Upgrading projects using the Graph Widget from Protege 3.3 to 3.4

This wiki article documents the process for upgrading Protege projects that use the graph widget from Protege 3.3 to Protege 3.4. Please note that this article is only applicable to OWL projects. If your project uses Frames, you do not need to perform any extra steps to upgrade.

Protege's underlying support for OWL underwent some major changes between the 3.3 and 3.4 releases. Overall, these changes are extremely positive and allow for much faster parsing, improved namespace handling, direct connection to the Pellet reasoner, etc. One side-effect of these changes however, is an incompatibility between versions in the way the graph widget reads and stores configuration data. If you have a project in Protege 3.3, it is not possible to simply open your project in 3.4 and have the graph widget function as expected. You must perform a series of manual steps (outlined below) to modify your 3.3 project in such a way that the graph widget will function properly in 3.4.

Requirements:

• Protege 3.4.1 or above.
• Please back up your work before proceeding.

Create a .forms file

• Open your project in Protege 3.3 (or whatever earlier version of Protege you are using).
• Select OWL | Preferences... to launch the OWL Preferences dialog.
• In the dialog, check the "Save forms to .forms file" checkbox (located at the bottom of the dialog).
• Click the Close button to dismiss the dialog.
• Save your project, and exit Protege.

You will notice that in addition to the .owl and .pprj file, there is now a .forms file in the same directory.

Fix connector slots

The creation of a .forms file in the previous step fixes a number of issues automatically. There are two problems remaining however, that must be fixed manually. The first is that the graph widget is not able to retrieve information about any of the "connector slots" that you may have assigned to particular classes via the graph widget configuration dialog. If you do not fix this issue, you would see graphs with nodes, but no links between nodes. Please re-assign connector slots by doing the following:

• Open your project in Protege 3.4.1 or above.
• Navigate to the Forms tab and select the form in the Form Browser pane that has a property whose selected widget type is the graph widget.
• Double-click on the property in the Form Editor to bring up the graph widget configuration dialog.