Protégé is an ontology editor for building and managing ontologies, available as Protégé Desktop and the browser-based WebProtégé. Both editions support the OWL 2 Web Ontology Language and are described as cross-compatible. WebProtégé enables collaborative viewing and editing, with sharing, permissions, threaded discussions, watches, email notifications, and revision history. Its ontologies can be uploaded and downloaded in formats such as RDF/XML, Turtle, OWL/XML, and OBO. Protégé Desktop connects to description logic reasoners including HermiT and Pellet, and provides a workspace for multiple ontologies, structure visualization, inference explanations, and refactoring. It is written in Java and uses a plug-in architecture for extensions. The software is free and supports Linux, macOS, Windows, and web use. Documentation includes FAQs, tutorials, user guides, and developer documentation. Free support is offered through mailing lists; users need to subscribe before posting.
Who it is for
Protégé suits people building or managing ontologies, including researchers, organisations, and governments. WebProtégé supports teams that need to view and edit OWL 2 ontologies collaboratively.
What is good
- Free and open source.
- Both editions support OWL 2.
- WebProtégé includes collaboration and revision history.
- Desktop connects to HermiT and Pellet reasoners.
- Desktop supports plug-ins and multiple ontologies.
What to know first
- Mailing-list users must subscribe before posting.
- WebProtégé and Desktop have different feature sets.
Verdict
Protégé combines a collaborative browser editor with a desktop ontology workspace, and both support OWL 2. Its free price and multiple platforms make it an option for ontology work across different environments.
Protégé plans and pricing
All plansCompared on knowledge graph software
- Free plan
- Yes
- Ontology modeling
- Yes
- Semantic reasoning
- Yes
- RDF/SPARQL support
- Yes
- Graph visualization
- Yes
- Import formats
- RDF/XML, Turtle, OWL/XML, OBO
- Deployment
- both
- Query languages
- SPARQL
