WebProtege: A collaborative ontology editor and knowledge acquisition tool for the Web

In this paper, we present WebProtege-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. WebProtege 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 WebProtege using the existing Protege 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 WebProtege in production settings for several projects. We present the main features of WebProtege and its architecture and describe briefly some of its uses for real-world projects. WebProtege is free and open source. An online demo is available at http://webprotege.stanford.edu.