Protege

Protege is an ontology management tool. More specifically, Protege is an opensource ontology editor and knowledge-base framework written in Java. Its architecture supports user developed plug-in tools. Existing plug-ins support OWL and RDF and allow the visualization of ontologies in different ways. Protege supports 2 different methods of modeling ontologies.

1. One way is through Protege-Frames editor, and the other is through the
2. Protege-OWL editor.

The main difference between the two methods is that the Protege-Frames editor support frame based ontologies while, not surprisingly, the Protege-OWL editor supports the W3C's OWL version of the semantic web ontology. Both modeling methods support the creation, visualization and manipulation of ontologies.

Protege was developed by Stanford Medical Informatics at the Stanford University School of Medicine with various supporters including:

• Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,
• National Cancer Institute,
• National Institute of Standards and Technology,
• National Institutes of Health's National Centers for Biomedical Computing,
• National Library of Medicine,
• National Science Foundation
• etc.

Protege is supported by a strong community of developers, government and corporate users and is downloadable from http://protege.stanford.edu/index.html