Protégé is a free, open source ontology editor and knowledge-base framework. Ontologies provide a way of organizing, sharing and analyzing information around a particular subject area or domain. The Chasing the Meridian ontology stores important facts and key relationships connecting the characters, places and events that occur in the novel.

TouchGraph is a tool used to visualize and navigate complex data. Some applications include viewing related products on Amanzon.com, and connections between websites with the GoogleBrowser. To see how TouchGraph works, follow the link to GoogleBrowser, enter "Akhenaten" in the search text box and then click on "Graph It!"

I have included the open-source TouchGraph library in the Chasing the Meridian ontology as a way of visualizing relationships. The screen shots below are samples from the Chasing ontology.

Readers who are registered on my site can download the complete ontology and the Protege application by following these steps:

• Download the Protege application, ontology files, and my own slot plug-in.
• Install Protege by double clicking the downloaded file, install_protege.exe. Follow the instructions as they appear, using the defaults provided. This will also add a desktop icon for the application.
• Unzip the ontology files to a convenient document directory. There are five files in the zip.
• Unzip the slot plugin (com.koan.zip) into the Protege plugins directory.
• Start up Protege by double-clicking on the desktop icon.
• In Protege, go to "File - Open" and open the project file (ChasingTheMeridian.pprj) you unzipped in the previous step.
  

You can find complete instructions for using Protege in the Help menu. As a quick start, click on the Instances tab of the main screen, then on the Place in the Class Browser. You should see a list of locations that occur in the novel. For a more detailed view, click on the "+" sign to open up Place, then click on Location. The display should be similar to the one below: