ICOM general workspace

All features of ICOM can be accessed via the menu bar. In addition, a toolbar is provided with the most frequently used functions. Toolbar buttons are grouped according to their functions. Context menus are also available for a quick access to operations related to the current mouse pointer position. Figure 1 shows the general layout of components in the ICOM workspace.

Figure 1: ICOM workspace.

ICOM allows the user the work simultaneously with several projects. Each project has a tab in the ICOM workspace below the toolbar. For each project there is a desktop panel, a browser, and the properties panel.

The desktop panel is the place where the several schemas in the project are represented. Each schema has its own window within this desktop. Editing operations such as adding, moving, editing and deleting classes, associations and axioms can be performed in the schema window. These windows are zoomables, allowing to represent ontologies with large number of components. The browser panel describes the hierarchy of elements available in each project. The top elements in this hierarchy are the schemas; classes and association appear as children of their schemas. The properties panel is dependent on the current selected object in the current schema window on the desktop. It shows several tabs with additional information about this object. The user is allowed to view and edit this information. Detailed information about these panel is given in next section.