The Protégé plugin that I have been working on, which I mentioned in my last few posts, has been released. It should be included in the Protégé build on Monday, but for now, people can download it from my website.
The original purpose of the plugin was really to help me with analyzing the changes being made to an ontology throughout the ontology’s evolution. However, after showing some demos, people thought other Protégé users might be interested in also having access to this information.
One of the views I like the most is the one shown in the screenshot below. On the left it shows the normal class hierarchy for an ontology, except that I’ve extended the tree to show how many changes exist within a branch and for a given term. The values in bold represent changes that have been made to that term, while the values in gray represent the number of changes that have been made to all subclasses within that branch.
In the screenshot, you can see that there’s been 2091 changes made within the “ICD Categories” branch (circled in red). However, what’s interesting is that 73% of these changes or 1534 changes, have occurred all within the “Diseases of the skin and subcutaneous tissue” branch (also circled in red).
This is useful because it allows the managers of the project, or anyone that is interested, really see where the ontology’s development is most active. In the future, I’d like to add in some controls for specifying a date range, that way you can see where the development is most active today, or say 6 months ago, or 2 years ago. I’m holding off a bit on this feature as all the sample projects I have with tracked changes are only starting their development so such fine grain control is unnecessary at the moment.
