ODK ROBOT plugin

This is a ROBOT plugin intended to be used within the Ontology Development Kit (ODK). It provides additional ROBOT commands to perform tasks not covered by the ROBOT built-in command set.

Available commands

The following commands are provided by the plugin:

• odk:subset: to create ontology subsets;
• odk:validate: to validate an ontology against an upper-level ontology;
• odk:normalize: to “normalise” an ontology.

Building

Build with Maven by running:

mvn clean package

This will produce two Jar files in the target directory.

The odk.jar file is the plugin itself. Place this file in your ROBOT plugins directory (by default ~/.robot/plugins), then call the commands by prefixing them with the basename of the Jar file in the plugins directory.

For example, if you placed the plugin at ~/.robot/plugins/odk.jar, you may call the subset command as follows:

robot odk:subset ...

The odk-robot-standalone-X.Y.Z.jar file is a standalone version of ROBOT that includes the commands provided by this plugin as is they were built-in commands. It is mostly intended for testing and debugging, as it allows using the commands from the plugin without having to actually install the plugin in a ROBOT plugins directory.

Using with the ODK

The plugin is (or will be) provided with the ODK Docker image. To use it as part of a ODK workflow, all that is needed is to make the rule in which the plugin is to be used depend on the ODK built-in rule all_robot_plugins. This will make the plugin available in the repository’s src/ontology/tmp/plugins directory, which is already set, in ODK workflows, as the ROBOT plugins directory.

For example:

target.owl: source1.owl source2.owl | all_robot_plugins
        $(ROBOT) merge -i source1.owl -i source2.owl \
                 odk:subset --subset MY_SUBSET \
                            --output target.owl

The plugin can also be used outside of any ODK workflow, by manually instructing ROBOT to look for plugins into the /tools/robot-plugins/ directory (e.g. by setting the ROBOT_PLUGINS_DIRECTORY environment variable to that directory).

Copying

The ODK ROBOT plugin is distributed under the same terms as the Ontology Development Kit itself (3-clause BSD license). See the COPYING file in the source distribution.