Protégé (software)

Protégé is an editor for modeling ontologies in computer science.

The ontology editor has been designed at the Institute of Medical computer science at Stanford University in California and is now an open source application - freely available - under the Mozilla Public License. Protégé was originally developed to create knowledge bases, respectively ontologies for medical research purposes. In these ontologies in the computer science sense of a formal, machine-readable representations of knowledge in a particular field (domain), which is represented by so-called concepts and relations.

With Protégé such knowledge bases can be created, filled with information and knowledge are retrieved from it. The development and runtime environment is written in Java and therefore platform independent.

The knowledge modeling with formal languages ​​is possible in Protégé in two ways:

• Protégé -frames works with the frame - based approach of knowledge representation, information on specific domain knowledge in a hierarchical structure of concepts, attributes of concepts ( slots) and concept instances ( individuals ) provides.
• Protégé - OWL is based on the Web Ontology Language (OWL ), the standard for ontology creation within the Semantic Web. Unlike the frame - based approach come here yet logical mechanisms in addition, by the implicit knowledge of the modeled data structure - can be inferred - even across several ontologies.

Protégé lists over 210,000 registered users and is currently available in version 4.2 (March 2013).