Note: this page is here for historical and sentimental reasons.

Find the updated documentation here.

The OWL API source code is contained in a GitHub repository on SourceForge, available here.

The link includes instructions to check out the latest source code - or any Git branch you might want to build.

Notice: the main source repository is on GitHub, not SourceForge. The old Git and SVN repositories on SourceForge are now disabled (not deleted).

Building with ANT

The API includes ANT build files. In order build with ANT, you must have a working ANT installation. For details on downloading and installing ANT please visit the ANT website. In a terminal window change to the antbuild directory in the directory where you checked out the OWL API. Type the following to build jar files for the source and binary code. This will create a build directory in the antbuild directory that contains an owlapi-bin.jar which contains the OWL API class files, and owlapi-src.jar containing the source code and javadoc directory containing javadoc of the public interfaces.

Building in an IDE

In order to build the API using an IDE, you can simply include the java directory for each module in the source path in your IDE.

Building with Maven

The API includes Maven build files (the pom.xml files). In order to build the API with Maven, you must have a working Maven installation. For details on downloading and installing Maven please visit the Maven website. Once you have a working Maven installation you can produce a set of OWL API jars by changing to the directory where you checked out the OWL API (usually the trunk directory) and typing the following

The OWL API jar files will be created and zipped up and placed in a directory called target.

The layout of API directories corresponds to a Maven build structure, but is relatively simple. The OWL API consists of several modules, such as api, impl, parsers etc. Inside each of these modules the source code can be found inside the src/main/java directory.