What is Protégé?
Protégé is an ontology description platform developed at Stanford’s Biomedical Informatics Research (BMIR) for creating, sharing, and visualizing web ontologies and taxonomies. Ontologies and taxonomies are descriptors for use in many instances, but most commonly for the Semantic Web, which is, most basically, a set of protocols that further automate the discovery and processing of online content.
How Can Protégé Help You?
There are several languages that can be used to prepare your public data for the Semantic Web. The most popular include Research Data Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL). The primary goal of creating web ontologies for your data is to make the resources you create more accessible and their discovery and analysis more fully automated, making it easier for others to discover and use.
It is important to understand your responsibilities for identifying, transmitting, redistributing, storing or disposing of sensitive information. For more information, refer to UW-Madison’s guide to handling sensitive data, and the UW System policy.
Using Protégé
Protégé is a powerful tool for preparing your data for the Semantic Web. Using Protégé Desktop or WebProtégé you can generate complex, shareable ontologies for your research outputs in order to make them easier to understand for your collaborators and anyone looking to build on your findings.
Protégé is compatible with all of the major Semantic Web languages including RDF/XML, Turtle, OWL/XML, and OBO. It also provides deductive classifiers that automatically validate the ontologies you create and predict new relationships based on existing knowledge structures.
Because one of the primary goals for generating web ontologies is to make your data more shareable and accessible, visualization can be an essential component of the process. As part of its features, Protégé offers tools for transforming your ontologies into dynamic visualizations for sharing your data structures and taxonomic features. These visualizations can also allow interactive navigation of the data, creating an intuitive way for collaborators to understand data structures and relationships.
Because Protégé is designed to facilitate collaboration, it also has customizable versioning and change tracking capabilities. As you and your research team generate new data, and integrate it into your Protégé ontology framework, each of the edits and additions made by members of your team is carefully documented. This not only allows you to keep your data organized and your team working together, but also provides ready-made documentation for how your project developed over time for those those interested in your findings later or for reporting to funding agencies.
How to Get Protégé
Getting started with Protégé is also easy because it has a dedicated user wiki, a mailing list, and courses to train you and your team. For a quick assessment of how Protégé would work for your projects, there are also brief tutorials in the tool as well as in Semantic Web ontologies. The large user base (over 350,000 registered users) also makes it likely that there are examples of others confronting challenges similar to that arise during your project. Finally, Protégé offers paid product support and detailed documentation for any projects that have highly specific project questions and needs.
Visit this link to assess which version of Protégé will best suit your project’s needs.