Connecting an ontology engineering tool with the SEALS Platform is easy. The way of connecting a tool to the platform is by implementing a Java programming interface that will allow the tool to execute the current evaluations over ontology engineering tools.

The Java interface contains a method importExportOntology:

    public void importExportOntology(String importFileLocation, String exportFileLocation, String ontologyLanguage)
            throws Exception;

The importExportOntology method takes one ontology stored in a file in some location, imports the ontology into the tool, and subsequently exports the ontology imported into the tool to another file in some location.

The method parameters are:

• importFileLocation. An URI with the location of the file with the ontology to be imported.
• exportFileLocation. An URI with the location of the file to store the exported ontology.
• ontologyLanguage. The ontology representation language used in the ontology, one of "RDFS", "OWL_Lite", "OWL_DL", "OWL_Full".

The ontology to be imported is serialized in RDF/XML and the ontology to be exported has to be serialized in RDF/XML.

After the execution of the import and export operations, the tool must be reset to the status previous to the beginning of the method execution in order to allow future executions of the method with the same parameters (e.g., the imported ontology must be removed from the tool, all the connections are closed, etc.).

A tool that implements this method should implement it for all the ontology languages specified in the description of the ontologyLanguage parameter.

When a tool has a single way of managing ontologies, regardless of the ontology language, the implementation can include a generic importExportOntology(importFileLocation, exportFileLocation) method and redirect the call of the method in this interface to that method.

The file with the Java interface can be found here.