Protégé and multi-users

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guillaume
Posts: 1
Joined: 23 Oct 2009, 12:47

Hello,

Before knowing this product we've been working last year on a modelisation of our system... and we used Protégé.
It's really a great product.

What stoped the industrialization of our project?
- restitution, visualization
- access restriction, as well by role as by perimeter
- bulk-load
These were the main facts.

Our modelization was quite like the standards ; it should be close to yours.

Vizualization may be solved by viewing part of the product (I didn't have a close look at it yet).

The problem with protégé is that access is granted to the whole project (meta and instances), which was problematic as we want each IT to update his domain (differents sites, differents responsabilities).

Bulk load of existing lists (servers, applications....) wasn't easy as well.

So... I may have mismatch myself, but here are the problems we encountered.

I haven't tryed EA yet but I've read almost all the documentations now, and the use made of protégé here doesn't seem to solve tese points, does it ?

Regards,

Guillaume.
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jonathan.carter
Posts: 1087
Joined: 04 Feb 2009, 15:44

Hi Guilllaume,

Thanks for this post. Out-of-the-box, Protege is still as you describe, except that in the latest version, 3.4.1, the access control has been implemented properly, so you can control who can access, read or write to a project. For something like an Enterprise Architecture repository, providing finer-grained access control - e.g. separating aspects of the overall architecture - I think will actually cause more problems than it solves. Generally, if you are an architect and you have access to write to the model, you should have access to all of it.

Our knowledge representation approach to the EA modelling means that I could be working, e.g. in the Application domain, but now I need to define a relationship to a Process in the Business domain and also relationships to Technology and Information things - so in effect I'd need access to the whole model.

To answer your other points, indeed Protege has poor support for them but we have addressed these with the tools that we provide in the Essential Project.

For visualisation, you can get some value from Jambalaya but we wanted to be able to execute analysis reports on the knowledge base about the enterprise. Therefore, we developed the Essential Viewer which is a Java Servlet, JSP and XSLT reporting framework including a number of out-of-the-box reports to explore the Protege knowledgebase, traversing relationships etc. So, when capturing information in Protege, the meta model we have built applies discipline in terms of how you capture the knowledge but our reports can (and typically do) cut across the layers of our EA meta model to answer difficult questions.
In addition, another member of the Essential Project Community has just contributed a component to visualise the contents of the knowledge base in MS Visio. Very nice.
We're adding to the visualisation side of things all the time.

As you say, the bulk-load of external data into Protege is not that capable out-of-the-box. Again, we provide some components to fill that gap. Our Essential Integration Server is still in an early form and will be further developed but this has been used for both one-off imports of existing information from spreadsheets, configuration managment systems, databases, other repositories and also for on-going synchronisation of the Essential repository in Protege with external sources. This means that a regular feed from an external repository can be used to update the contents of the Essential repository as the external data source changes.
Additionally, a member of the Community has contributed a Data Load component.

I agree that Protege is an excellent product and I agree with the issues that you found. We've addressed those issues with the Essential Project components which are all available open-source, which is how we can make them available to the Protege community.

Hope this helps

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
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