Protégé

Protégé can refer to a person who is guided or mentored by a more experienced sponsor; the feminine form is protégée. The term originates from the French verb protéger, meaning to protect, and entered English in the early modern period to describe someone under a patron's care.

In computing, Protégé is a free, open-source ontology editor and knowledge-base framework used to develop and maintain domain ontologies for the semantic web and related fields. It is a cross-platform Java application offering graphical editors for classes, properties, individuals, and annotations, and it supports standards such as OWL and RDF/RDFS. Protégé can integrate reasoning tools through a plug-in architecture and can be extended with additional capabilities via community plug-ins. A web-based variant, WebProtégé, supports collaborative ontology editing online.

Protégé was developed for academic and research use and has been widely adopted in bioinformatics, information science, and education. Its modular design and active community have contributed to a large ecosystem of tutorials, plug-ins, and example ontologies.