What is supported, and what is not¶
Every capability that has been asked of OntoBoard, with an honest answer for each. The point of this page is that it can be disagreed with: each row says where the thing is, so a claim that turns out to be wrong can be found and corrected rather than argued about.
How to read the status. Yes means it is implemented and covered by tests, and in most cases measured against a real ontology — NFDIcore, MWO, PMDCO or the 26-sheet MatWerk knowledge graph. Partly means it works within a limit, and the limit is written out. No means it is not there; where it is not there on purpose, the reason is given.
Last full measurement: release 1.118.0. 2,347 tests; both supported hosts (Protégé 5.5.0 on Java 8 and 5.6.9 on Java 11) start the bundle, pass the self-check 9/9 and the self-test 11/11.
1. The board and the canvas¶
| Asked for | Status | Where, or what is missing |
|---|---|---|
| A Protégé plugin rather than a Miro board | Yes | The whole plugin. Miro was considered and rejected: the editing has to be in the tool that owns the model. |
| A diagram of the ontology you can arrange | Yes | OntoBoard tab → Schema Canvas. Drag, group, frame, align, zoom, search. |
| Drag and drop, interactive editing | Yes | Nodes are moved and connected on the canvas; an edge drawn becomes an axiom. |
| Add the selected entity to the canvas | Yes | Right-click, or the selection bridge keeps canvas and Protégé selection in step. |
| Properties and individuals shown, not only classes | Yes | Object, data and annotation properties, individuals, datatypes. |
| Inferences shown on the canvas | Yes | Inferred edges are drawn differently from asserted ones, and each can be explained. |
| It should look like Miro, not like a 1998 applet | Partly | Legend, prefix colours, alignment guides, pinned tooltips, shortcuts panel, layouts. It is a Swing canvas inside Protégé and will not be mistaken for a web whiteboard. |
| Export the diagram | Yes | PNG, SVG and DOT. |
| Layout saved between sessions | Yes | Per ontology, with a version guard. |
2. ODK projects¶
The steps below are the ODK workflow as it was given to OntoBoard, in order.
| Step | Status | Where, or what is missing |
|---|---|---|
| Create a project without Docker | Yes | Project → New ODK project…. Docker is not required by the plugin at all: the generated Makefile calls robot directly. Docker is still the easiest way to get the full ODK toolchain, and seed-via-docker.sh is not run from here. |
| Open an existing ODK project | Yes | Project → Open existing ODK project…, and Open from GitHub… clones one. |
<ontology>-odk.yaml visible and editable inside Protégé |
Yes | Project → Project configuration… reads and writes it; OdkYaml preserves what it does not model rather than rewriting the file. |
id, title, github_org, repo |
Yes | In that editor, and used by the scaffold. |
release_artefacts / primary_release |
Partly | export_formats is honoured by Release…; which artefacts (base, full, simple) are built is the project's own Makefile, not this menu. |
import_group — declaring imports |
Yes | Reuse → Check imports, Reuse → Import terms from a list…, Reuse → Refresh imports…, and the YAML editor. |
| Module type BOT / TOP / STAR / custom | Yes | Reuse → Import terms from a list… offers the extraction method and writes the catalog entry. |
robot_report settings, custom_profile |
Yes | Check and test → Quality report… uses the project's own profile.txt when there is one, and says which profile it used. |
sh run.sh make … targets |
Partly | Build and release → Build… runs the targets of a project whose Makefile is the one this OntoBoard writes in-process, with nothing installed; any other Makefile needs make and the tools it calls. update_repo is modelled by Update project files…, which regenerates the files OntoBoard generates — it is not ODK's own update_repo. |
src/scripts/ — run your own scripts |
Yes | Project → Run a project script…, with arguments and the output captured. |
<ontology>-idranges.owl |
Yes | Project → ID ranges… shows every allocation and can allocate a block. Used for minting on the canvas and, since 1.117.0, in the sheets. |
profile.txt |
Yes | Generated, and read by the quality report. |
catalog-v001.xml |
Yes | Generated, honoured by every robot call in the generated Makefile, and written to by Reuse → Import terms from a list…. |
src/metadata for OBO Foundry submission |
No | Not generated and not checked. |
| A form that returns to itself when a value is rejected | Yes | Every parameter dialog re-opens with what was typed, including the project wizard. |
make not on PATH should not be a dead end |
Yes | OntoBoard → Check requirements… says what is missing and how to get it; several targets run in-process without make. |
3. ROBOT operations¶
| Operation | Status | Where |
|---|---|---|
| measure | Yes | Check and test → Measure… — 60 metrics |
| report | Yes | Check and test → Quality report… — 32 rules, project profile honoured |
| validate-profile | Yes | Check and test → Profile… |
| explain | Yes | Check and test → Explain… |
| query / SPARQL | Yes | Check and test → SPARQL… |
| reason | Yes | In Release…, and the Protégé reasoners on the canvas |
| relax / reduce / materialize | Yes | Terms → Transform… |
| export | Yes | Terms → Export terms… |
| extract | Yes | Reuse → Import terms from a list… |
| rename | Yes | Terms → Rename IRIs…, previewed before it applies |
| template | Yes | Spreadsheets → Template… |
| diff | Yes | Build and release → Compare releases… |
| merge, annotate | Partly | Used inside Release and Build; not exposed as their own menu items. |
| Parameters adjustable, logs visible | Yes | Every operation has a parameter dialog with help on each field, and the result dialog lists what it did. |
4. Releases and versioning¶
| Asked for | Status | Where, or what is missing |
|---|---|---|
| A published version distinct from the edit file | Yes | Build and release → Release… |
| A dated release IRI, OBO style | Yes | …/releases/2026-10-12/mwo.owl, with a dated copy kept. |
| Semantic versioning, as MWO publishes | Yes (1.117.0) | Choose the convention in the dialog. Semantic publishes …/mwo/3.0.2 with owl:versionInfo "3.0.2" — the exact shape MWO's own release.sh produces — and links owl:priorVersion to the release before it. |
| The convention should be the user's choice | Yes | A Versioning field with both. The default is read from what the ontology already declares, so releasing somebody else's project continues their history rather than starting a second one. |
| The build should be able to do both too | Yes | The generated Makefile takes VERSION and VERSION_IRI as overrides (make VERSION=3.0.2 VERSION_IRI=… prepare_release), which is how MWO's release.sh drives it. |
| Refuse to publish something broken | Yes | The quality report at error level, and a check that no term the last release published has vanished. |
| Release notes | Yes | CHANGES.md written beside the dated copy, generated from the diff. |
| Compare two releases | Partly | Build and release → Compare releases… compares dated or semantic directories under releases/. A project that publishes by git tag and PURL without keeping a releases/ folder — which MWO does — has nothing for it to list. |
5. Knowledge graphs, templates and spreadsheets¶
| Asked for | Status | Where, or what is missing |
|---|---|---|
| Build a graph from ROBOT templates | Yes | Spreadsheets → Template…. Measured on the whole 26-sheet MatWerk graph: 8,471 rows, 36,761 axioms, 6,771 individuals, 0 problems, about 7 seconds. |
| Every individual created and visible | Yes | They are ordinary individuals in the ontology, in Protégé's own views. |
| Export per sheet or all together | Yes | A sheet at a time, or merged with the ontology. |
| Open the sheets inside Protégé | Yes | OntoBoard Sheets tab, or Spreadsheets → Sheet editor. |
| Edit like a spreadsheet | Yes | Cells, rows, fill-down, undo, cut-down keyboard behaviour. Row numbers down the side are the sheet's own numbers, which is what every message about these files quotes. |
| Auto-completion | Yes | Columns that name another term complete from every open sheet and from the ontology. |
| Cleaning and suggestions | Yes | Ten kinds of finding, marked in the cell; the ones with an obvious correction can be fixed in a single undoable step. 307 were applied to the MatWerk sheets with the build byte-identical afterwards. |
| Duplicate detection | Yes | Duplicate identifiers, near-duplicate labels, ambiguous names. |
| Create an instance from a name typed into an object-property column | Yes | Right-click the cell. The sheet, the type and the identifier are all decided from the sheets' own evidence, and it refuses rather than guessing when they do not say. |
| An IRI generator | Yes (1.117.0) | Generate IRIs... fills every row that has content but no identifier. Right-click a cell for one row. |
| More ways to form an identifier | Yes (1.118.0) | Six, each previewed with a real example before anything is written: a block from -idranges.owl; continuing the sheet's own numbering; a timestamp (epoch milliseconds plus a counter - the scheme 8,406 of the 8,471 live MatWerk identifiers already use); a timestamp and the editor; a random UUID; a UUID derived from the label (version 5 under the same namespace the MatWerk harvester uses, so a row filled in by hand and the same row harvested later agree); and the label as a readable slug. |
| Editing the ROBOT template row | Yes (1.118.0) | Rows 1 and 2 are two editable rows where the column header was. Every edit is checked against robot-core's own validateTemplateString: a string ROBOT would refuse is marked, because it costs the whole sheet rather than the column. Add column adds one with its template cell empty, which is ROBOT's way of saying "ignore this". |
| Search the data | Yes (1.117.0) | The Find box searches every sheet and wraps. |
| Pop-up menus | Yes | Right-click: fix, create, mint, insert/duplicate/delete a row, find this value everywhere, explain the mark. |
| Add further sheets | Yes | New sheet…, with starter columns and identifiers continuing the project's numbering. |
| Work with an existing Excel file | Partly (1.117.0) | Import Excel… reads a real .xlsx — shared strings, styles, dates, formulas, rich text — and converts each tab to a .tsv in the folder. Verified cell-by-cell against openpyxl on seven workbooks (11,389 cells, 19 tabs, six written by Excel itself). It does not write .xlsx: edits are saved to the .tsv files, which is what ROBOT reads and what git can merge. |
| Templates in the ontology's own directory | Yes (1.134.0) | The first of templates/ beside the open file, the project's src/templates, kg/templates and templates/ at the project root that holds a sheet is opened automatically, and the editor says which and where else it looked. Project templates ▾ lists all of them to choose from. Before 1.134.0 only src/templates or templates/ beside the file was tried, so a project with its knowledge graph in kg/templates opened from its edit file showed "No templates yet". |
| Provenance: who added what, when | Yes | Record who adds the contributor and date columns and stamps rows; on the ontology side Record who edits terms… does the same per term. |
| Logs from ROBOT and the reasoner | Yes | Both reported in the result dialog; ELK over the built graph was measured at 3.0s for 34,773 axioms. |
6. Patterns¶
| Asked for | Status | Where |
|---|---|---|
| A library of design patterns | Yes | Pattern library… — 162 patterns, in the main menu |
| Patterns from MWO, PMDco, NFDIcore | Yes | Included, each labelled with its source |
| Search and browse | Partly | Search covers name, description and source; a few fields are not searched |
| Recommend patterns for this ontology | Partly | A recommender ranks them; on a large ontology its scores saturate and the ranking becomes less useful |
| Import a pattern's terms | Yes | From the library dialog |
| Contribute your own | Yes | A folder of your own patterns is read alongside the bundled ones |
| DOSDP templates | No | Not read or generated |
7. Collaboration and git¶
| Asked for | Status | Where, or what is missing |
|---|---|---|
| Several people on one ontology, live | Partly | Collaboration… — a host starts a session and shares a link; peers see cursors, selections and edits. It carries declarations, SubClassOf, class assertions and annotation assertions; equivalence and disjointness are counted and reported rather than carried. |
| See other people's cursors | Yes | Peer cursors and selections on the canvas |
| Warn when two people edit one term | Partly | A peer who changed a term in the last five minutes is shown as editing it. Nothing can prevent it — Protégé owns the edit model, and a lock that could not be enforced would be worse than none. |
| git: clone, branch, commit, push, pull | Yes | Git… |
| Open a pull request | Yes | Pull request…, which also lists what is open |
| Review a pull request | No | The browser's job; an OWL review is Compare releases…, not a line diff of RDF/XML |
| Documented so two people can try it locally | Yes | testing collaboration locally |
8. Reasoning¶
| Asked for | Status | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Use Protégé's reasoners | Yes | ELK, HermiT and the rest, with inferences drawn on the canvas |
| Konclude | Yes | Check and test → Reason with Konclude… — classify, realise, consistency |
Koncludix materialize |
Partly | Offered as Materialise everything (needs Koncludix), and a stock Konclude that rejects it is told apart from a missing binary. Not verified end to end: there is no Koncludix binary on the development machine, so the command line and the reader are tested and the round trip is not. |
| Explain an inference | Yes | Check and test → Explain…, and per-edge on the canvas |
9. Documentation and the project page¶
| Asked for | Status | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Generate ontology documentation | Yes | Build and release → Documentation… (Widoco) |
| A documentation site for OntoBoard itself | Yes | MkDocs, published by GitHub Pages |
| A fixed header and a logo on that site | Yes | In the theme overrides |
| A multi-version, multi-language ontology site | No | Widoco can; it is not driven from here |
10. Appearance and usability¶
| Asked for | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| A menu grouping every feature | Yes | One OntoBoard menu with seven submenus by job: Project, Reuse, Terms, Spreadsheets, Check and test, Build and release, Share |
| KG builder and pattern library in the main menu | Yes | Spreadsheets → Template… and Reuse → Pattern library… |
| Forms that explain themselves | Yes | Every field has a help line saying what it changes and why |
| Dialogs that do not stretch off the screen | Yes | Tall forms scroll; there is a rendering test for it |
| The sheet editor should have room | Yes (1.117.0) | Its own workspace tab, the whole window |
Not supported, and why¶
- Writing
.xlsx. Reading a workbook is four parts of the format; writing one Excel will open is the whole of it. Imported tabs become.tsv, which is what ROBOT reads. - An LLM assistant. Discussed, not built. It would need a key per user, a prompt that does not leak the ontology, and a way to show what it is unsure about.
- SSSOM mappings. The most-converged gap in the earlier review and still open.
- DOSDP templates. Separate from the pattern library and not read.
- OBO Foundry submission metadata. Not generated.
- Reviewing pull requests in Protégé. See above.
Known reports not yet re-checked¶
Found by a review pass and not since re-verified. Listed because a defect nobody wrote down is one nobody fixes:
- Import terms… can overwrite a hand-maintained term list.
- A Rename IRIs… that leaves references behind in a sheet that was not open.
- An
AIcolumn whose prefix cannot be resolved. - Several patterns collapsing onto one import module.
- The Getting started page still describing the removed web application.
Fixed in 1.118.0¶
JTablereinstates its own column header when it is added to a scroll pane, so the editable header rows laid out at 0 x 0 while the rendered picture still looked plausible. Caught by asserting the layout rather than the appearance.- Column widths were fitted to the data and the heading but never to the template string, so the
columns whose spec explains the most -
AT ...^^xsd:anyURI- were the ones whose spec clipped. IriGenerator.fillBlanksreturned 0 both when there was nothing to do and when it could not find the ID column. Those are different answers and it now says which.
Fixed in 1.117.0 while auditing this list¶
- New rows in a sheet lost their zero padding: a project with seven-digit identifiers got
MWO_1226afterMWO_0001225. It sorts wrongly, matches no project'siddigits, and builds perfectly happily, so nothing said so. - The project wizard invited you to leave Base IRI empty "to use the OBO convention", which mints every term under a namespace you do not own. The field is now filled in visibly and the hint says when to change it.
- A view config with a single view at its root threw while the tab was built; Protégé removed the tab and logged nothing. Found by the host smoke, not by 2,276 tests.