Protege-2000: An Open-Source Ontology-Development and Knowledge-Acquisition Environment

Abstract Prot´eg´e-2000 is an open-source tool that as-sists users in the construction of large electronic knowl-edge bases. It has an intuitive user interface that enablesdevelopers to create and edit domain ontologies. Nu-merous plugins provide alternative visualization mecha-nisms, enable management of multiple ontologies, allowthe use of inference engines and problem solvers withProt´eg´e ontologies, and provide other functionality. TheProt´eg´e user community has more than 7000 members.Background Prot´eg´e-2000 is the latest in a series oftools developed in our laboratory to assist users in theconstruction of large electronic knowledge bases. 1 Thedirect-manipulation user interface allows developers tocreate and edit domain ontologies that represent thesalient concepts and relationships in an application area.From the ontology, the system automatically constructsa graphical knowledge-acquisition system that allows ap-plication specialists to enter the content knowledge re-quired for specific applications.Prot´eg´e-2000 is written in Java, and thus runs un-der a wide variety of operating systems. Prot´eg´e-2000is available under the open-source license and can bedownloaded from http://protege.stanford.edu.System description The Prot´eg´e-2000 systempresents the user with a series of “tabs,” where eachtab offers the user access to a different element of thesystem’s functionality. Standard tabs allow users toedit and browse a domain ontology, to custom-tailorthe knowledge-acquisition tool generated from a domainontology, to enter knowledge into the knowledge-acquisition tool, and to search the knowledge base.An essential goal of the system is to make knowledgebrowsing and entry as simple for users as possible. Whenthe system generates a knowledge-acquisition tool froman ontology, users enter domain information by filling inthe blanks of intuitive forms, selecting items from lists,and by drawing diagrams.Furthermore, perhaps, one of the biggest values of theProt´eg´e system is the availability of dozens of plugins