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An Ontology Visualization & Authoring Workbench for KRSS-Based Description Logic & OWL Reasoners

RacerPorter

A Knowledge Base Inspection, Visualization & Authoring Workbench for KRSS-Based Description Logic (& OWL) Reasoners

About

This is the source code of RacerPorter. RacerPorter (aka "Sirius") was the default GUI to the RacerPro Description Logic & OWL reasoner. RacerPorter allows you to connect to and manage RacerPro / Racer servers, load knowledge bases (KBs) and OWL ontologies into them, invoke reasoning services, browse and visualize KBs and ontologies, author KBs, etc. At one point, we coined the term OBIT - Ontology Browsing and Inspection Tool. It can also be used for authoring knowledge bases though, but textually only, i.e., unlike tools like Protégé, its focus is not on visual ontology authoring, but on textual KB / ontology authoring, using concise, human readable & human "typable" syntaxes (e.g., the LISP-based KRSS syntax). RacerPorter addresses the KB & ontology expert, not the novice, casual, or "end user".

Even though RacerPorter was primarily developed for Racer / RacerPro, and hence contains much custom Racer functionality, it can nevertheless be customized for other KRSS-compliant DL reasoners easily as well, simply by stripping it down and removing Racer-specific functionality, e.g., MiDeLoRa.

RacerPorter was last successfully tested with LispWorks 6.1 & CAPI on Windows 10, 64bit, in March 2021.

RacerPorter uses LispWorks CAPI - The Common Application Programming Interface (CAPI) to implement a platform-agnostic GUI; it should run out of the box on Linux, Mac, and Windows. Check out the LispWorks CAPI pages for more details about this great cross-platform GUI toolkit. RacerPorter is probably one of the biggest CAPI applications ever written. For RacerPorter, there is no way around using CAPI - this will only work with LispWorks. Getting it to run on SBCL and/or CLIM is hopeless.

Here are a few pictures that should give an idea of its capabilities:

Papers

See the RacerPorter paper.

Usage / Loading

Adjust the logical pathname translations in sirius-sysdcl.lisp to match your environment. Then, simply do a load, and start the program with (racerporter-dev) followed by (sirius::sirius).

Edit the profile ("Edit Profil..." button) to automatically start a RacerPro executable for your OS (or use the "Start RacerPro" button, followed by "Connect"). Also make sure that the racerlicense.lic file gets copied into your home directory, or the RacerPro application directory.

Please note that this is an older version of RacerPro, which is provided here for convenience and testing purposes only, in order to get RacerPorter up and running quickly. RacerPro is now called Racer, and is available as OpenSource. You will find examples and the manual on the Racer GitHub repo as well.