COLLABORATIVE DEVELOPMENT OF LARGE - SCALE BIOMEDICAL ONTOLOGIES - Collaborative Computational Technologies for Biomedical Research - page 191

Figure 12.7 WebProt é g é user interface showing the NCI Thesaurus. The user interface
is organized in portlets that provide independent pieces of functionality. The class tree
portlet on the left-hand side shows the class hierarchy. The right-hand side is populated
with three portlets for showing the properties of a class, the axioms, and the notes
attached to a class.
Additionally, we have implemented portlets to support the collaborative
aspects of the development, including a notes and discussions portlet, a review
portlet, a change-history portlet, a watched entities and branches portlet, and
so on.
The user interface of WebProtégé is organized as a series of tabs. We pre-
defi ned some of the most common tabs that are available in other desktop
ontology development tools, such as the Classes, Properties, and Individuals
tabs. A user may change the default layout of these tabs by simply dragging
and dropping the portlets in the display. New portlets can be added by making
a selection in the toolbar. The user may select from a list of predefi ned portlets
and then confi gure their layout. The user also has the possibility of adding new
tabs to combine pieces of functionality that are not available in the predefi ned
tabs by using the Add tab toolbar menu.
Portlets provide independent pieces of functionality (e.g., display the class
tree, display the properties). Rather than hard coding the dependencies among
the portlets, we implemented a generic selection model, and all portlets display
the current selection in the selection model. For each tab, we defi ne a control-
ling portlet that provides the selection for all other portlets. For example, the
class-tree portlet is the controlling portlet in the Classes tab, which means that
all other portlets in that tab will display the information related to the selected
class in the class tree. The controlling portlet is specifi ed in the confi guration
XML fi le and can be changed dynamically at runtime.