Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is Maponto?

Answer: Maponto is a tab plugin of the Protege knowledge management platform.

2.  Does Maponto work with any Protege builds?

Answer: No. Maponto only works with Protege 3.0 or early. Maponto was developed for Protege 2.1. Recently, we have tested that Maponto will run on Protege 3.0.  The Protege OWL plugin APIs have been dramatically changed since Protege 3.0. We haven't synchronized Maponto with latest Protege builds yet.

3. What software I need to run Maponto?

Answer: First, you must download Protege 3.0 or early from the Protege download page: http://protege.stanford.edu/download/old-releases . Next, make sure that the JAVA virtual machine is 1.5. Third, download Maponto.zip from: https://sourceforge.net/projects/maponto/ .
   
4. How to install Maponto?

Answer: Place Maponto.zip in the 'plugins' directory of your Protege installation. Unzip Maponto.zip in the 'plugins' directory. You will see that a new directory 'edu.toronto.cs.maponto' is created. This directory should contains two files: Maponto.jar and plugin.properties.

5.  How to execute Maponto?
Answer: Start Protege.  Build an existing OWL file or create a new OWL file. Go to Project -> Configure. In the Configure window, check MapontoTab.  Click OK. The Maponto tab will show up. Click the Maponto tab to start your mapping task. On the Maponto tab, browse to the schema and ontology files in your file system. Click 'Start...' button. Sometimes, you have to click somewhere in the Protege window to see the next window.

6. What are the formats for the input files?

Answer: Maponto accepts a SQL DDL file for relational table definition. It accepts an OWL file for ontology.

7.  How to create a semantic mapping between a relational schema and an ontology?

Answer: Once both the schema and the ontology files are loaded, you first need to specify simple correspondences by clicking the "+Add" button in the Correspondence pane. An "Add Correspondence" window will appear. Use mouse pointer to locate an element in the schema and an element in the ontology. Click 'Add' to add a correspondences. Keep adding other correspondences. When all correspondences have been added, click 'Close'. It will bring you back to the main window of Maponto. Click 'Do It' to start generating semantic mapping.

8. What are the results?

Answer: The candidate mapping formulas are shown in the 'Mapping Formulas' tab. You can click the 'Underlying Connections' tab to see the tree structure corresponding to a mapping formula.

9. It seems that Maponto does not work on my files. What is the problem?

Answer: Please try these two example files: utcs.schema and univ-cs.owl  to see whether you could get some example results. For your problem, probably, Maponto does not read in the schema file. If all files have been loaded, then we need to look into the source code.

10. Is Maponto constantly maintained?

Answer: Maponto is a research prototype. It is not maintained by the researchers.

11.  Is there any test data?

Answer: Yes. Please try these two example files: utcs.schema and univ-cs.owl . More test data is available in MapontoExamples.zip .

12. What is next?

Answer: Anybody wants to continue the development of Maponto is welcome.