About us
Protégé was developed by the Stanford Division of Computational Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
Our Team
Beyond Stanford
Community Contributors
While Protégé began at Stanford, the team behind it has grown well beyond campus. Today, developers and researchers around the world help shape the software through code contributions, bug fixes, and new releases. We're grateful to every contributor who has helped Protégé evolve.
In particular, Damien Goutte-Gattat serves as the current primary maintainer of Protégé Desktop, handling bug fixes and producing releases.
We're also grateful to Michael DeBellis, who wrote an updated Protégé tutorial covering ontology development with Protégé 5, including sections on SWRL, SPARQL, and SHACL.
matthewhorridge 
stdotjohn 
jvendetti 
nickdrummond 
gouttegd 
alexsilaghi 
johardi 
ykazakov 
soimugeoWB 
soimugeo 
csnyulas 
mosfet80 
alexskr 
hkir-dev 
sesuncedu 
stefborg 
rsgoncalves 
gandharvm 
Nizal-Shammry 
tsarkov 
shawntanzk 
Azolo 
KMax 
mever 
tudorache 
vemonet 
JLLeitschuh 
balhoff 
cthoyt 
bdionne 
saarus72 We're also deeply grateful to our wider community of users whose feedback has shaped Protégé over the years. In particular, the OBO Foundry community has been an invaluable source of insight, helping us refine and enhance Protégé through years of active use and thoughtful feedback.
History
Over three decades of development
The Protégé project began in the 1980s at Stanford University as part of Mark Musen's doctoral research into methods for building knowledge-based systems. The earliest systems — OPAL, Protégé-1, and Protégé-II — explored how domain models could be used to generate knowledge-acquisition tools, first for cancer-chemotherapy advisors and then for a broader range of intelligent systems.
By the late 1990s, the ontology-editing component of Protégé had taken on a life of its own. A Java-based rewrite (Protégé-2000) introduced the plug-in architecture that enabled support for RDF and, soon after, the W3C's Web Ontology Language (OWL). A collaboration with Alan Rector's group at the University of Manchester helped ensure comprehensive OWL support and produced widely used documentation and tutorials.
Protégé has been used in a number of significant projects, including the development of the National Cancer Institute Thesaurus and the World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), which was developed using a WebProtégé-based environment.
Today, Protégé is available as a desktop application (Protégé Desktop) and a web-based editor (WebProtégé), both supporting the OWL 2 specification. The project continues to be developed at Stanford, with growing contributions from the open-source community.
Read the full history: "The Protégé Project: A Look Back and a Look Forward" (Musen, 2015) →
Stanford Division of Computational Medicine
About the Division
At the Stanford Division of Computational Medicine we develop cutting-edge ways to acquire, represent, and process information about human health. Our work enables the Institute of Medicine's vision for a Learning Health System by translating biomedical data into actionable insights for decision making.
Our research advances the state of the art in semantic technology, biostatistics, and the modeling of biomedical systems to benefit clinical and translational research as well as patient care.
We develop and manage the Protégé system for developing and maintaining ontologies, and the National Center for Biomedical Ontology, which provides both a repository as well as Web services for clinicians and biomedical scientists to use ontologies. We assist the World Health Organization (WHO) by creating the technological infrastructure for the development and dissemination of the International Classification of Diseases, the International Classification of Traditional Medicine, and other ontologies. WHO has designated the Division an official Collaborating Centre.
Division faculty members and staff participate in the Stanford Biomedical Informatics (BMI) graduate program, and we house the BMI program's support staff. Through our Quantitative Sciences Unit, we offer collaborative support on the application of techniques in biostatistics or biomedical informatics. We also offer short courses, tutorials, and seminars on biomedical informatics and about technologies developed at the Division.
As healthcare and biomedicine overflow with more data than we can deal with, and as the knowledge base of medicine and biology expands exponentially, we focus on developing the tools and methods needed to translate biomedical data into actionable insights.
Attribution
A Word About Citing
We would be grateful if scientific publications resulting from projects that make use of Protégé would include the following sentence in the acknowledgments section:
"This work was conducted using Protégé."
Please use the following reference citation for Protégé:
Musen, M.A. The Protégé project: A look back and a look forward. AI Matters. Association of Computing Machinery Specific Interest Group in Artificial Intelligence, 1(4), June 2015. DOI: 10.1145/2557001.25757003.
Get in touch
Contact
If you have questions about Protégé or WebProtégé, the best way to reach us is through our mailing lists.
Mailing Lists