Protégé: Information about the Protégé Wiki

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New Protégé Semantic MediaWiki (preferred wiki for new content, in use since late 2007)
Older Protégé PurpleWiki (still has some useful content not yet migrated to new wiki)

More Information

Umm... why are there two wikis?
Semantic searching on the new wiki

Please post questions and/or comments about the wikis on the protege-discussion mailing list.

Umm... why are there two wikis?

In 2004, Peter Yim, President & CEO of CIM Engineering, Inc., generously offered to host a Protégé Wiki. We gratefully accepted as Stanford did not yet provide support for wiki software. Between 2004 and 2007, the Protégé Wiki at CIM Engineering was heavily used, growing to over 280 separate wiki articles.

In early 2007, we began researching the possiblity of using a semantically enabled wiki, largely due to difficulties in managing the Protégé plug-ins library. On our old wiki, there are two separate wiki articles that list Protégé plug-ins. One page lists plug-ins by type, e.g., tab widgets, slot widgets, etc., and the other page lists plug-ins by topics such as Visualization, Semantic Web, Inference & Reasoning, etc. This method of maintaining lists of Protégé plug-ins has several disadvantages:

Plug-in contributors had to add links to their plug-ins on two separate wiki pages. This was an inconvenient, error-prone process that led to many plug-ins listed on one page, but not the other.
There is no way from scanning the list of plug-ins to determine which version of Protégé each plug-in is compatible with. Users were forced to click each plug-in link separately and read the plug-in documentation. Painful!
There is also no way to determine which flavor of Protégé each plug-in is compatible with, i.e., Protégé-Frames or Protégé-OWL. Again, users were forced to click each plug-in link separately and read the plug-in documentation. Ouch!

Transitioning to Semantic MediaWiki has allowed us to address the aformentioned issues expressed by the user community. We've created categories on our new wiki such as "Application" and "Plugin" and properties like "Compatible with" and "For application" to facilitate associations between plug-ins and particular versions or flavors of Protégé. For example, if you use Protégé Client-Server, you may be interested to see a list of plug-ins that have been modified to work in client-server mode. On the new wiki, you can now go to a single page that lists only those plug-ins that are compatible with Protégé Client-Server:

protege semantic mediawiki

The list of plug-ins in the screenshot above is dynamically generated from the results of a semantic query that asks for all plug-ins that declared themselves as compatible with Protégé Client-Server. No more manual upkeep of plug-in lists!

We do realize that temporarily having two Protégé Wikis is awkward and we are working on completing the migration of articles from the old wiki to the new Semantic MediaWiki. Your patience with us is appreciated!

Acknowledgements: we would like to (profusely) thank the following people for helping us with the transition to Semantic MediaWiki: York Sure, Holger Lewen, Markus Zondler, Denny Vrandecic, Markus Krötzsch, and Yaron Koren.

Semantic searching on the new wiki

The new Protégé Wiki uses Semantic MediaWiki, which is a free extension of MediaWiki that allows users to better structure and organize knowledge in a wiki by adding semantic annotations to wiki articles. Included with Semantic MediaWiki is a simple query language that users can employ to access specific information in the wiki.

To use the query language, go to the Special:Ask page on the Protégé Wiki. Say for example you are interested in finding a list of all plug-ins developed by Tania Tudorache at BMIR. In the Query text area, enter the following text:


	[[Category:Plugin]]

	[[Developed by::Tania Tudorache]]

	[[Affiliated with::Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research]]

Click the Find Results button and notice that a list appears at the bottom of the page with all wiki articles matching the criteria in the Query box:

semantic search example

Another example might be if you wanted to see a list of all plug-ins that fall under the topic of Semantic Web and work with the Protégé-OWL editor. Enter the following text in the Query box:


	[[Category:Plugin]]

	[[For Application::Protege-OWL]]

	[[Has topic::Semantic Web]]

For this example, let's also assume that we would like to know who developed these plug-ins and when they were last upated. In the Additional printouts box, enter two printout criteria:


	?Developed by

	?Last update

Finally, enter "Last update" in the "Sort by column" text box and choose "Descending" from the drop down box. Click the Find Results button and the list of wiki articles that match the search criteria are displayed, along with additional columns in the results table that indicate who developed each plug-in and when they were last updated (sorted in reverse chronological order as requested):

semantic search example

In order to experiment and work with semantic searches on the wiki, you need to know what categories and properties are available. Categories are listed on the Special:Categories page:

http://protegewiki.stanford.edu/index.php/Special:Categories

... and properties are listed on the Special:Properties page:

http://protegewiki.stanford.edu/index.php/Special:Properties

Extensive documentation of the SMW query language is available in the SMW User Manual.