About

I thought using a rich client application would be better for an ontology modelling tool (although my profesional experience is more web-server based, and it is over 10 years since i did some serious Java Swing work.

The attempt was to build a prototype application. I therefore highlight it is not a finished product, precisely one of the goals of the development is to explore the conceptuals and techlogical limitations of my approach (without costing an overwhelming ammount of time).

The Ontology is modelled on nodes and arcs. Nodes just have an Id, a name, a node type, a content field, and a list of arcs connecting to other ontology nodes. Arcs just add up an arc-type. All the editable fields are plain text in simple text fields.

In order to make some custom representation of the ontology content, a user can make "diagrams". Here a diagram is a tree of diagram nodes. Starting from a point (e.g. a question) and providing possible answers, arguments, etc. Note ontology nodes are not used directly on diagrams, as generic definition might not be the best fit in an specific context, therefore diagram nodes with custom description are used.

License

This work is published under the CC SA BY (Creative Commons Share-Alike Atribution 4.0+)

Executable and source links

Executable jar (52KB). run java -jar obelus02.jar

Download source (zip, Eclipse project, 29KB, JDK 1.7+)