Overview of PROMPT

The PROMPT tab allows you to manage multiple ontologies in Protégé-2000. Using PROMPT you can:

Except for move frames, these operations create a copy of the ontology in your working project and leave the original project intact. In the case of move frames, however, both the included and including projects are changed.

Merging ontologies

PROMPT is an interactive ontology-merging tool. It guides you through the merging process making suggestions, determining conflicts, and proposing conflict-resolution strategies. The initial suggestions are based on the linguistic similarity of the frame names. After you select  an operation to perform, PROMPT determines which conflicts in the merged ontology the operation may have caused and proposes possible solutions to the conflicts. It then considers the structure of the ontology around the arguments to the latest operations and proposes other operations that you should perform. For more information, see Merge Mode.

Extracting a part of an ontology

Sometimes, you may want to save only part of your ontology for various reasons: to use some subset of the knowledge base in a different project, to distribute only part of your ontology, to debug a smaller portion of it, and so on. The PROMPT tab allows you to pick and choose frames and then copy them into your local project. You can choose a frame and copy everything related to the frame (the transitive closure of what the frame refers to, except for the subclasses—otherwise you'll always get the whole knowledge base). Alternatively, you can copy frames one by one. In that case, PROMPT will show you the list of referenced frames that you have not yet copied. For more information, see Extract Mode.

Moving frames from included to including project

Protégé facilitates reuse and development of ontologies through the project-inclusion mechanism: One project can include one or several other projects and reuse all frames from the included projects.  The "moving frames" mode of the PROMPT tab allows you to move frames between projects. You can move the frames from the included project into the including one, thus altering both. When moving a frame, you can choose everything that must be moved in order for the projects to remain consistent. An included project should always stand on its own, therefore, no frame in the included project should depend on a frame in the including project. You can also choose to perform the process frame-by-frame. There is a running list of conflicts to help you sever all the dependencies from included to including project in the latter mode. For more information, see Moving Frames Mode.

Comparing two versions of the same ontology

This model allows you to compare two different versions of the same ontology. In this case, the heuristics behind the standard PROMPT merge can be modified. When the two projects to be merged are known to be different versions of the same ontology, Protégé can use stronger heuristics, suggesting, for example, that a single unmatched sibling of the same parent in the two different versions may be the same frame with a different name. By concentrating on the differences between two similar projects (rather than the similarities of two different projects as in merge), compare can give much better results for the type of reconciliation required in version control. For more information, see Compare Mode.


Next: Setting Up PROMPT

Prompt Table of Contents