I have not retried this procedure recently. I am once again working with latest versions of Plone, Archetypes and ArchGenXML for another project but I have no current need for doing the OWL-to-Plone transformation once again (Im starting with an UML model, not an ontology). Id be very much interested in knowing the results of your experiments if you try the whole procedure with recent versions of Protege (or other).

The most notable changes I can imagine are about Poseidon (the UML modeller). You should try using ArgoUML instead of Poseidon. Poseidon is a commercial product for which there no longer is a free version easily triable. <a href=”http://argouml.tigris.org/” rel=”nofollow”>ArgoUML</a> (open source) should do the trick unless it chokes on Protege’s XMI format. You’ll tell me. :)

The Plone stack has kept on maturing so you may enjoy additional features on this side. There is a Plone extension product that may serve as a basis for automating this procedure: <a href=”http://plone.org/products/feedfeeder” rel=”nofollow”>feedfeeder</a>. Currently feedfeeder creates live Plone content from <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_%28standard%29″ rel=”nofollow”>Atom</a> feeds (it instantiates articles from their Atom description). But allowing feedfeeder to have ArchGenXML processing XMI feeds might be doable. <a href=”http://vanrees.org/” rel=”nofollow”>Reinout Van Rees</a> might be interested in providing some support for this.

Note also that <a href=”http://vanrees.org/weblog/topics/archgenxml” rel=”nofollow”>a successor to ArchGenXML is being worked on as part of a Google Summer Of Code project. This successor is called Genesis</a>. The guy working on Genesis may release something in September or so. He seems to have some good expertise in the field of code generation so he may be of good advice for your work.

Whatever issue you encounter in your experiment please keep me and readers informed by posting comments here ! :)

I am wondering if you have used more current versions of Protege, Plone, Archetypes, ArchgenXML and Marshall following this same procedure? Has there been improvements or changes? I am very much interested in pursuing this process further. I find your thoughts and ideas a kindred spirit of my own.

I have a connection to the Protege development group and to an ontology group/forum. Does this interest you?

Once you have archgenxml and an .xmi file, you are supposed to do a python Archgenxml.py -o YourProduct yourprojectfile.xmi as a result of which you obtain a working Plone product called YourProduct. When you install YourProduct and restart Plone, you should now be able to add instances of the content types declared in YourProduct into Plone folders. If this is not the case, check in ZMI/Control Panel/Products that YourProduct is detected by Zope and not broken. Then check in your Plone instance/site setup/Add-remove products that YourProduct has been installed. Then if you still can’t see any new content type in the “add to folder” menus of your home Plone folder, then maybe YourProduct does not declare content types properly. Check in the ZMI/Plone instance/portal_types tool that new types have been added. If this is not the case, then ask for support to the plone-users mailing list.

Chrysostomos, what do you call “the ontology of Plone”? What is such a thing? I know of PloneOntology being an additional Plone product but I have not tested it any further than installing it and playing with it very briefly. There are various Plone products referring to ontologies but I don’t know exactly what you want to do. Please clarify your request.

Before I send you some files, could you please indicate at which step in this procedure you get parser errors ? Which piece of software issues these errors ?

Can I obtain a working example (owl and xmi file) and the version of each used software ?

Transform an OWL ontology into a working Plone content-type.