au.csiro.ontology.importer

Interface IImporter

All Known Implementing Classes:

BaseImporter, OWLImporter, RF1Importer, RF2Importer

public interface IImporter

Defines the methods that must be implemented by classes used to import ontologies defined in external formats into our internal format.

Author:

Alejandro Metke

Method Summary

Modifier and Type	Method and Description
Iterator<Ontology>	getOntologyVersions(IProgressMonitor monitor) There are several models used to represent ontologies that have been adopted by different groups.
List<String>	getProblems() Returns a list of problems that happened during the import process.

Method Detail

getOntologyVersions

Iterator<Ontology> getOntologyVersions(IProgressMonitor monitor)
                                throws ImportException

There are several models used to represent ontologies that have been adopted by different groups. In this implementation a model based on SNOMED's RF2 format is used because it contains features that are not available in other formats.

An ontology in RF2 maps to a set of interdependent modules. This method returns all the ontologies found in a set of files. Implementations of importers for other file formats can simply return a single ontology.

If the files contain related modules then all of them are returned as a single ontology. This method returns an iterator that allows importing each ontology version.

Parameters:

monitor - A progress monitor.

Returns:

An interator that allows importing one ontology version at a time.

Throws:

ImportException - if a problem occurs when importing the ontologies.

getProblems

List<String> getProblems()

Returns a list of problems that happened during the import process. This method should be called after an ImportException is thrown to get a detailed list of problems.

Returns: