Creating Semantic Web Contents with Protégé-2000

  • Authors:

  • Natalya F. Noy;Michael Sintek;Stefan Decker;Monica Crubézy;Ray W. Fergerson;Mark A. Musen

  • Affiliations:

  • -;-;-;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Intelligent Systems
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

One of the most recent trends in the evolution of the World Wide Web is the growing awareness of the need for a Semantic Web, a Web of information that machines can understand and process. The requirement to encode machine-interpretable information on the Web led to the development of a number of languages for representing this information. These languages are coming from different communities that have different sets of requirements and goals in mind. The languages that are emerging have many similar features, but each of them is different from the others. Currently, there is no consensus on which language or set of languages should become the standard and researchers and developers continue to experiment with the existing languages and to develop new ones.Protégé-2000 is an ontology-development and knowledge-acquisition environment developed in our laboratory. It has a graphical user interface which enables ontology developers to concentrate on conceptual modeling without knowing or thinking about syntax of an output language. Protégé-2000 has a flexible knowledge model and an extensible plugin architecture. These two features allow developers to adapt Protégé-2000 quickly and easily to work as an ontology-editing environment for new Semantic Web languages; there is no need to create new tools for these languages from scratch. As a result, developers obtain a graphical and easy-to-use editor for conceptual models in the new language. They can experiment with the features of the language, decide if the language itself is sufficiently expressive, or sufficiently flexible to meet their requirements. In this paper, we describe how Protégé-2000 can be adapted for editing models in different Semantic Web languages. We describe as examples Protégé-based editors for RDFS and OIL.