.. _section-Creating a Sunflower project:

Creating a Sunflower project
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

To create a **Sunflower** project, from the main navigation toolbar, select **File > New > Sunflower Project**. A dialog box appears asking for a new project name and a file location. Enter the desired project name, for example, mySunflowerProject. Uncheck **Use default location** and use the **Browse** button to navigate to a location of your choice to save the new project files to.  Since you will be writing **Sunflower** files to this location, it should be writable by you.  For example, a convenient location for a **Sunflower** project on a Windows system is C:\\Users\\YourUserName\\Desktop\\mySunflowerProject.

After the new project is created, the next step is to create ontology files with object relationships. To do this, in the file navigation window, click to highlight the new project, then right click and select **New > Flora File**. A dialog window appears asking for a file name.  Enter the file name and click **Finish**.  An empty file of the specified name will be created under the project.  To add content to the file, double click it to load it into the **Text Editor**.  Use Flora syntax for statements in the file. For a quick tutorial of Flora syntax, see Section :ref:`section-flora`. The file family.flr which we have been using is such a file.  It contains object classes and rules for **Sunflower** to reason with.  A collection of other sample Flora ontology files are also available in Section :ref:`section-example`.

The above describes how to create a **Sunflower** project by creating ontology files from scratch.  But a new **Sunflower** project can be based on ontology files which already exist. If you have existing Flora ontology files you want **Sunflower** to use, as in the case of using family.flr in the UserManualExamples folder, select **File > New > Sunflower Project**, then navigate to where the ontology files are, and choose that as the new project’s location.  Refer to Section :ref:`section-Loading a project` for a detailed example of these steps.

Ontologies in SQL, CSV or OWL formats can also be reasoned by **Sunflower**.  But these ontologies must first be imported and translated into .flr.  To create a new **Sunflower** project to reason ontologies in SQL, CSV or OWL formats, select **File > New > Sunflower Project** to create a new project as before, then navigate to where the ontology directory or file is, and use **File > import** to perform the import. There are detailed examples of importing the different types of ontologies in Section :ref:`section-Import/Translate from OWL, OWL2, CSV, SQL`.

Each **Sunflower** project should have its own unique location. If the location of an existing **Sunflower** project is chosen for a new **Sunflower** project, the system issues a warning and the new project creation process will not succeed, as shown in :numref:`figure-Sunflower-GUI-new-project-warning.png`.

.. _figure-Sunflower-GUI-new-project-warning.png:

.. figure:: ../../figs/Sunflower-GUI-new-project-warning.png
   :alt: Warning about using existing project location for new project

   Warning about using existing project location for new project

The project creation process puts a **core** folder and a .project file in the specified location. The **core** folder contains modules which perform natural languages paraphrasing, inheritance, Flora data types, Java to Prolog conversion, etc., as shown in :numref:`figure-Sunflower-GUI-new-project-core.png`. When a newer version of **Sunflower** is installed, the **Update Core** option from the main navigation window’s right-click menu can be used to bring these modules up-to-date. See Section :ref:`section-Launching Sunflower` for more information about **Update Core**.

.. _figure-Sunflower-GUI-new-project-core.png:

.. figure:: ../../figs/Sunflower-GUI-new-project-core.png
   :alt: Content of **core** in new project location

   Content of **core** in new project location