Protégé is easily extensible and many people have developed plug-ins and applications for the Protégé-Frames and/or Protégé-OWL editors.

In addition to downloading Protégé, we encourage you to browse the library of plug-ins and applications on our Wiki. Please refer to the section entitled "How do I find plug-ins for Protégé?" for helpful tips on navigating the wiki-based plug-in library.


How do I find plug-ins for Protégé?
How do I contribute my plug-in or application to the library?

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How do I find plug-ins for Protégé?

Good News! For many years we manually maintained lists of known Protégé plug-ins. This method was labor intensive and error prone (read more). In late 2007 we began transitioning to a new wiki that uses the Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) software. The result is a plug-ins library that is much easier for our user community to navigate in terms of locating extensions for particular versions or flavors of Protégé.

Due to the semantic underpinnings of SMW, we have the ability to automatically generate lists of plug-ins based on criteria such as topics, types, plug-ins for Protégé-OWL vs. Protégé-Frames, plug-ins for Protege 3.4 vs. 4.0, etc. To follow is a list of links to wiki articles that we feel will be of particular interest to those searching for Protégé plug-ins:

• Plug-in Library home page - visit this page if you would like to:
  • Browse by topic. Click any of the links in the "Topics" section such as Visualization, Inference, Semantic Web, etc., to see a list of plug-ins specific to your topic of interest.
  • Browse by type. Click any of the links in the "Type" section such as API, Tab Widget, View, etc., to see a list of plug-ins of a particluar type.
• Protégé-OWL page - lists plug-ins compatible with the Protégé-OWL editor.
• Protégé-Frames page - lists plug-ins compatible with the Protégé-Frames editor.
• Protégé Client-Server page - lists plug-ins adapted to work in Protégé's client-server mode.
• Protégé 4.0 (and other versions) - if you want to see a list of plug-ins that are compatible with a certain version of Protégé, use the following steps:
  • Go to the Protégé-Frames or Protégé-OWL pages on the wiki (links provided directly above).
  • Scroll down towards the bottom of the page to see the "Versions of ..." table.
  • In the versions table, click the link for the version of Protégé you are working with, e.g., Protégé-OWL 4.0, Protégé-Frames 3.4, etc.
  • The resulting page will show a dynamically generated list of plug-ins compatible with the requested version:
    
    
    
    
• Plugin Category page - if you are just curious to see the entire list of plug-ins developed for Protégé, have a look at the SMW Category page for the "Plugin" category.

Please note: the process of migrating information about plug-ins from our manually maintained lists to the new wiki is somewhat ongoing. If you are having trouble finding a plug-in on the new wiki, you might try looking on our old wiki, which is the last place we were maintaining such lists. If you are still having problems, please send questions and/or comments to the protege-discussion mailing list.

How do I contribute my plug-in or application to the library?

More Good News! The Protégé wiki now uses an extension called Semantic Forms, which gives plug-in contributors the ability to add and edit data about plug-ins using web-based forms. There is no longer any need to know wiki syntax if you want to enter your contribution on our wiki!

Use the following steps to contribute your work to the plug-ins library:

• Navigate to the home page of the Protégé Plugin Library.
• Click the "New Plugin" button on the right-hand side of the page in the "Register your Plugin" section:
  
  
  
  
• On the resulting page, enter the name of your plug-in and click the "Add or edit" button.
• You should now see a web form with the title of your plug-in at the top of the page:
  
  
  
  Please fill out as much information as possible about your plug-in. Notice that there are tips on the right-hand side of the page to help you choose appropriate text when you are specifying the type of your plug-in, which flavor of Protégé your plug-in was developed for, etc.
  
  Another important point is that Semantic MediaWiki is case sensitive! This is relevant because the Semantic Forms try to tie in the information you enter about your plug-in to existing categories on the wiki after you click the "Save page" button. For example, if you developed a tab widget plug-in for Protégé, you must enter the exact text of "Tab Widget" in the type field in the web form (not "tab widget", "Tab-Widget", "Tab", or any other variation). If you make a mistake and misspell the type, the wiki article describing your plug-in will not be added to the existing Tab Widget category:
  
  
  
  
• When you are done filling out the form, click the Save page button and you will see the new wiki article for your plug-in.

Congratulations! By now we hope you have successfully added your contribution to our library! If you need to edit information about your plug-in, you can click the "Edit this plugin" button on the right-hand side of the wiki article and you will be returned to the form for adding/entering data about your plug-in.

If you have difficulties trying to contribute something to the library, please send questions to the protege-discussion mailing list.