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 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 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 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 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 Fig. 92.

Fig. 92 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 Fig. 93. 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 Launching Sunflower for more information about Update Core.

Fig. 93 Content of core in new project location