Knowledge modeling at the millennium : The design and evolution of Protégé-2000

Abstract

It has been 13 years since the first version of Protg was run. The original tool was a small application, aimed mainly at building knowledge-acquisition tools for a few very specialized programs (it grew out of the ONCOCIN project and the subsequent attempts to build expert systems for protocol-based therapy planning). The most recent version, Protg-2000, incorporates the Open Knowledge Base Connectivity (OKBC) knowledge model, is written to run across a wide variety of platforms, supports customized user-interface extensions, and has been used by over 300 individuals and research groups, most of whom are only peripherally interested in medical informatics. Researchers not directly involved in the project might well wonder how Protg evolved, what are the reasons for the repeated reimplementations, and how to tell the various versions apart. In this paper, we give an overview of the evolution of Protg, examining the methodological assumptions underlying the original Protg system and dis...