New TBC Feature - Group by Namespace

One of the greatest strengths of TopBraid Composer (TBC) that sets it apart from other ontology tools, is its ability to easily work with and manage collections of ontologies. When it is so easy to work with independent ontologies you'll find yourself going modular quite naturally. And why not? Modularity is a fundamental programming organization principle that you've used for years, decades even, that makes reuse possible. Who writes monolithic programs anymore? The same goes with ontology composition.

So when the capability is at your fingertips again you'll find yourself using it. The unintended consequence however will be a proliferation of namespaces. Typically, but not necessarily, at the level of one namespace per ontology file. As you get even more advanced in ontology asset management, you'll begin to split content, under a single namespace, across several files. Remember, namspaces and baseURIs are not one in the same.

With lots of namespaces in play searching for a particular class or property takes increasing effort. Either from longer lists to scroll through or from longer lists of search results to sort through when a search string shows up as a pattern in more and more names over your inventory. Here is where the new feature "Group by Namespace" comes to the rescue.

In the lower left corner of the TBC "Classes" and "Properties" views, on the left side of the search input area, you will find now an icon of three stacked items
( and ). By default the classes and properties are listed in alphabetical order, with hierarchy for the subclass and subproperty trees. Click this icon and the organization will change to where a list of namespace prefixes are shown at the root level. Each namespace prefix acts now like a folder that contains a flat, but still alphabetic, list of the properties or classes defined under that namespace.

This may not seem like a such a great convenience at first, but when you work with hundreds or even thousands of items under tens and tens of namespaces the feature's utility quickly comes to light.