Web-Protege: A Lightweight OWL Ontology Editor for the Web

In this paper, we present Web-Prot´ ege—a web-based lightweight on- tology editor. Web-Proteg´ e is open source, uses the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) for the user interface, and Proteg´ e for supporting ontology services. We used components of Collaborative Prot´ ege to augment the ontology-editing environ- ment with facilities for discussions and annotations. In this paper, we describe both the server and the client components of the system. We built the user inter- face using the portal metaphor, which allows easy customization of the user in- terface for individual users. The plug-in architecture allows easy extension of the user interface with custom components. The server component is implemented in Java and provides methods for accessing the ontology content and manages the changes the users make in different clients. A demo version is available at http://bmir-protege-dev1.stanford.edu/webprotege/.