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Abstract
In this paper, we present WebProtégé-a lightweight ontology editor and knowledge acquisition
tool for the Web. With the wide adoption of Web 2.0 platforms and the gradual adoption
of ontologies and Semantic Web technologies in the real world, we need ontology-development
tools that are better suited for the novel ways of interacting, constructing and consuming
knowledge. Users today take Web-based content creation and online collaboration for
granted. WebProtégé integrates these features as part of the ontology development
process itself. We tried to lower the entry barrier to ontology development by providing
a tool that is accessible from any Web browser, has extensive support for collaboration,
and a highly customizable and pluggable user interface that can be adapted to any
level of user expertise. The declarative user interface enabled us to create custom
knowledge-acquisition forms tailored for domain experts. We built WebProtégé using
the existing Protégé infrastructure, which supports collaboration on the back end
side, and the Google Web Toolkit for the front end. The generic and extensible infrastructure
allowed us to easily deploy WebProtégé in production settings for several projects.
We present the main features of WebProtégé and its architecture and describe briefly
some of its uses for real-world projects. WebProtégé is free and open source. An online
demo is available at http://webprotege.stanford.edu.
[1
]Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research, Stanford University, 1265 Welch
Road, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. E-mail: {tudorache,nyulas,noy,musen}@stanford.edu