eXtreme Design

eXtreme Design (XD) is a framework for pattern based ontology design. The project is manteined by the Semantic Technology Laboratory (STLab, ISTC-CNR) team.

The project was started under the project, which still partly supports its development.

Currently, the development is focused on XD Tools, a tool for support pattern based ontology design.

Follow the project on our list: extremedesign-project@lists.sourceforge.net

XD Tools

The concept of networked ontology is native in XD. The main idea is to provide the user with pattern-based operations, such as specialization, composition, instantiation, according to the guidelines defined in the context of the eXtreme Design methodology. The tool provides a perspective - eXtreme Design - that groups all the user components: the ODP Registry browser and ODP Details view, the XD Selector, and the XD Analyzer. Other components can be activated in several ways within the interface, i.e. the XD Wizards, the ODP Publish dialog, and the XD Annotation dialog.

ODP Registry and ODP Details view: through this view users can have access to a set of reusable OWL patterns that can be directly browsed and exploited in the modelling process, without necessarily having them locally stored. When a pattern is selected from the registry tree, all OWL annotations are visualized in the ODP Details view;
XD Selector: The aim is to give support to the end-user with a component for proposing patterns to be reused to cover requirements expressed as competency questions. The user can query these basic selection services providing either simple keywords or a complete competency question (CQ). The XD Selector view displays as result a list of proposed ODPs to be reused in the current working ontology. By click on a result, details (ontology annotations) are shown in the ODP Details view.
Specialization Wizard: The Specialization wizard is the component provided by XD Tools for guiding the user in the specialization of Content ODPs. The wizard can be accessed either from the Navigation view, i.e. through the contextual menu activated while right-clicking on an ontology, from the ODP Registry view or from XD Selector's results view. When the process is finalized, a message is displayed with the option to open the dialog for ontology annotation, i.e. to annotate the new ontology module that has been created.
XD Annotation dialog: It provides the facility to annotate the ontology using other vocabularies in addition to the annotation properties already provided by OWL/RDF. For the Content ODPs the CPAnnotationSchema[1] is supported[2]
XD Analyzer: The aim of this tool is to provide suggestions and feedback to the user with respect to how good practices in ontology design have been followed, according to the XD methodology (for instance missing labels and comments, isolated entities, unused imported ontologies).

How to obtain XD Tools:

For Eclipse 3.5+

Use the following update site: http://extremedesign.sourceforge.net/sites/eclipse/3.5

For NeOn Toolkit 2.4

Use the following update site: http://extremedesign.sourceforge.net/sites/ntk/2.4

Note: the version distributed by the embedded NTK update site is not compatible (you can't install it from there).

For NeOn Toolkit 3.2

XD Tools is distributed from the NeOn Toolkit update site

User documentation

Help documentation

Source code

SVN repository is hosted at sourceforge. To develop with the latest version:

Latest trunk (ongoing work, based on NeOn Toolkit 2.5 owlapi):

svn co https://extremedesign.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/extremedesign/trunk/xd-tools

Source code for XD Tools for the NeOn Toolkit version 2.4.*:

svn co https://extremedesign.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/extremedesign/tags/xd-tools/ntk-xd-1.1.4.1

Source code for XD Tools for Eclipse 3.5+:

svn co https://extremedesign.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/extremedesign/tags/xd-tools/eclipse-xd-1.1.5

Source code for XD Tools for the NeOn Toolkit version 2.3.*:

svn co https://extremedesign.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/extremedesign/tags/xd-tools/ntk-xd-1.1.2

More about XD

Developers: Developers