This document is about the development of Protege-2000 Plugins in Java on the Eclipse platform. To show how the development works in principle, a tab-widget plugin, the simplest type of plugin, is developed
See Protege-2000 Programming Development Kit [Crubézy et al., 2004] for information for information about programming Protege-2000 plugins and Eclipse platform [Eclipse, 2004] for information about the implementation of Java projects on the eclipse platform
The integration of Protege plugins into Protege is very simple in principal. There are only two steps which need to be done for the integration of new plugins:
1. Copy the compiled .class or .jar file(s) ot the plugin to the Protege "plugins" directory
2. Add the new plugin to the plugins directory manifest by editing the file "plugins/meta-inf/manifest.mf"
Eclipse allows one to automise and integrate these steps with the implementation of the plugin itself
1. Create a folder for the source files, e.g. "src", and a separate folder for the binary class files, e.g. "class", and link it to the plugins folder of Protege as shown in the following screensho
2. Set the new output file to the created directory by changing the "default output folder" in Project/Properties/Java Build Path.
NOTE: Because updating the output folder overwrites the actual contents of the plugin file, backup the contents of Proteges plugins folder (at least the meta-inf subdirectory) and copy it back after linking the output folder.
3. Develop your plugin as explained in the Protege-2000 Plugin Tutorial [Crubézy et al., 2004] by adding the protege.jar library to Project/Properties/Java Build Path/Libraries and implementing the source code of your plugin into the source folder.
4. To register the plugin, it must be added to OWL manifest file. This can also be done within Eclipse by restoring the manifest.mf file (see the following screenshot):
5. Compile and run the plugin from within Eclipse
[Eclipse, 2004] Eclipse Universal Tool Platfortm., available from http://www.eclipse.org/.
[Crubézy et al., 2004] Monica Crubézy, Olivier Dameron, Ray Fergerson, Holger Knublauch, Mark Musen, Natasha Noy, Daniel Rubin, Samson Tu, Jennifer Vendetti. Protege Programming Development Kit, the Stanford University School of Medicine, available from http://protege.stanford.edu/doc/pdk/index.html.
The work is funded by the European Commission under the projects DIP, Knowledge Web, Ontoweb, SEKT, SWWS, Esperonto, COG and h-TechSight; by Science Foundation Ireland under the DERI-Lion project; and by the Vienna city government under the CoOperate programme.
The editors would like to thank to all the members of the WSMO working group for their advises and inputs to this document.