Eddy Overview
Eddy is designed around a modular architecture, where the core component is enriched by additional features through plugins.
Here you can find Eddy's official releases. Choose the executables for Windows, macOS, or Linux. Each executable includes the redistributable version of the OpenJDK JVM, which is necessary to execute Eddy.
After installing and launching Eddy, you will see the Welcome window, from which you will be able to Create a new project, open an existing project, and you will see a list of the most recent projects you have worked on.
If you choose to create a new project, you will be prompted to provide:
- a name for the project
- an IRI for the Ontology
- a prefix for the Ontology IRI (which will be the default prefix of the ontology until otherwise specified)
Once the project is created, you will have access to Eddy's user interface. We'll use the screenshot below to illustrate the different components.
The interface is composed of the following main components:
- the Main Menu
- the Toolbar
- the Modeling Canvas
- the Widgets
The Modeling Canvas is placed at the center of the interface, and manages the ontology diagrams through tabs. One or more ontology diagrams can be open at any given time.
The left and right sidebar areas contain Widgets for editing, navigating, and inspecting a GRAPHOL ontology. Each widget is a plugin which can be installed or uninstalled (or activated and deactivated), and more can be added, which adds extra flexibility to the system. The layout of the interface is completely customizable, and is maintained across multiple working sessions. Eddy allows to create and manage multiple diagrams for a single ontology, for the purpose of easier visualization and understanding, particularly in the case of large ontologies. Any element of the ontology can occur as a node in different diagrams, and even more than once in the same diagram.
The Toolbar placed on top of the working area offers quick access to the majority of the operations provided by Eddy such as creating, opening or saving, scaling the canvas, and more.