Protegé settings for adding to imported ontologies

[sfluegel05]

Recently, I found out that Protegé allows you to choose between the following two options:

• Add fresh axioms to active ontology
• Add fresh axioms to subject defining ontology

This setting can be found under File->Preferences->General->Axioms

Changing this from active ontology to subject defining ontology helped me save a lot of time when implementing #810. There, I had to add a lot of axioms to already existing classes. The problem: all these classes belong to different modules and I didn't know beforehand which class belongs to to which module. With the option Add fresh axioms to active ontology I would have needed to switch between modules, searching for classes there and hoping they are actually part of the module where I expect them to be in.
The more efficient way of dealing with this problem was choosing the option Add fresh axioms to subject defining ontology. This way, I just had to open oeo.omn, which imports all other modules, and was able to add all axioms there. Protegé then sorted them into the correct module automatically.
Another use case are term tracker items: If you have implemented a feature and have opened a PR, you don't have to go through all the modules you worked on again to add term tracker items, but you can do everything from oeo.omn.

I would recommend always using the option Add fresh axioms to subject defining ontology, since it is what we want to do in the OEO for most cases. The only exception I can think of is annotating entities from the external modules (i.e, iao- , ro- and uo-module), where you don't want to change the external module itself, but this case is rather rare.

Finding this setting helped me saving quite some time and probably avoiding some errors, so I hope it helps you as well.

[akleinau]

this is amazing! Would have definitely saved a lot of time for me too!

[akleinau]

have you considered adding this to the tutorials in the wiki?

[l-emele]

I rephrased @sfluegel05's text a bit an added it here: https://github.com/OpenEnergyPlatform/ontology/wiki/How-to-use-prot%C3%A9g%C3%A9-to-change-the-ontology