Samuel's Tech Blog

As a subproject, I'm now focusing on doing some comparison between reasoning in Prolog and Pellet, using example data from NMRShiftDB.org. Below I'm documenting my planning, + any new findings while I'm digging in to this subpeoject.

My project has been more or less on hold for around a week because of exams and other stuff. Looking forward to getting some concrete things done now. While still reading up a bit on OWL, I've started taken the first steps of the prolog/blipkit integration with a simple method for querying a prolog on the form "subject, a predicate, and an object".

Upgraded to Ubuntu Karmic Koala, and took the occasion to swith to sun-java-6 (Had problems with OpenJDK before).

Bioclipse with blipkit plugin still works like a charm. Just had to modify the Eclipse startup script, since the path's to my java libraries changed.

For my own documentation I went ahead and summarized all the steps I had to take

1. In order to start blipkit from java commandline, and
2. In order to start blipkit from an Eclipse plugin.

I now also managed to start blipkit from inside Eclipse.

The trick was to start the whole eclipse (The eclipse using for building Bioclipse) preceded with LD_PRELOAD=...the path to libjpl.so , and before that adding the paths to where libjava.so and libjvm.so are located.

Finally got blipkit started from java via jpl :)

• (Thanks to Andrew Koster on the SWIPL mailing list, who made me continue researching the LD_PRELOAD trick!)

In order to get the jpl java examples to work, LD_LIBRARY_PATH has to contain:

/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.19/jre/lib/i386/client/:/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.19/jre/lib/i386/

/usr/local/lib/pl-5.7.15/lib/jpl.jar:/home/samuel/install/swi-prolog/pl57/packages/jpl/examples/java/Test

Now firing up blipkit works, when calling Java from commandline!!!

• Simply moving initialization statements from the blip startup script in /usr/local/bin/blip to /home/samuel/.plrc did not work.

So, today I finally got the jpl (Java / Prolog API) up running inside Bioclipse, succeeding with compiling a simple test prolog program (The "test 0" in the "Test" example supplied with SWI-Prolog). Only talking to swi-prolog so far though, not blipkit. Starting blipkit includes loading prolog files etc. as specified in the blipkit startup script, so will have to study that in more detail.

A link by Arvid led me to Dzone, where I found their "refcards": http://refcardz.dzone.com/ and after 15 minutes of reading, a lot of things, like file structure of Eclipse plug-in projects, had became much clearer.

For anyone new to Bioclipse plugin development, I think the following ones are the most relevant (especially the first two):

• Eclipse Plug-in Development
• Getting started with Equinox and OSGi
• Spring Configuration
• Spring Annotations

You will have to register at the site, and browse through the available ones in order to find them

This was a very good article on classloading and booting etc. in Bioclipse, with indispensable hints for how to best incorporate native code in eclipse plugins.