Setting Up a Platform

It is likely you came to this page from the link to it on the post Structuring the work in the parallel, non-technical blog.

In the first two posts there I introduce this blog, as a technical subsidiary.

What you will find here now, is a detailed description of the steps to creating the work environment for what follows in later posts.

• A free, open version control system where you can get the source code.
• An Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for working with the source code, which is very focused on Jena and what it has to offer.
• An ontology storage server.

Once you've worked your way through the material here you should be able to run a little Java application that stuffs some ontological data into permanent storage.

The main issue is what Jena expects its permanent storage to look like.  Once you know what you're doing, it is well documented in its source distribution package ...  %JENAROOT%\doc\DB\mysql-howto.html. To get from here to there, I've figured out what is necessary and explained it all below.

To make it easy to deliver the necessary bits and pieces, I set up a public repository of all the code you will need here ... Subversion repository for MOWa.

To get ready to use that, please refer to the tutorial, Using Tortoise to get the MOWa source code.

All of my examples from now on are going to depend a lot on usage of Eclipse, so once you have got the source code in your machine you are going to want to set up Eclipse too ... Get the project into Eclipse.

With all that we still aren't done!  We have to set up our database access ... Create the MySql Database.

For future reference I've created a little database connectivity tester.  It's a good idea to have a toolbox of such utilities, and run them when you're about to do any other testing just to make sure you are working from solid foundations.  So give this a try, to be sure you can Connect to MySql from Eclipse.