My intent is not to bash open source projects--quite the contrary! While I hope to help save you some time by telling you which tools to avoid, I mostly hope to help you find the best, most useful tools out there! With that, I turn my attention to Protégé.
Protégé is a free, open-source ontology editor and knowledge-base framework that was born out of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Protégé has been around for a while and has been supported with government funding and a number of partners.
You will find Protégé's web site at:
http://protege.stanford.eduProtégé is an excellent product--they know how to do an open-source project the right way.
To get started you download of a single installation file. It is based on Java and the project team has conveniently provided installations options with and without the Java Virtual Machine. So, if you are not already running Java, then you still have just one installation file to start with.
Installation took me just less than 3 minutes the very first time that I installed Protégé.
A start up icon on Windows was automatically installed. It has a very nice interface; it's easy to understand the layout and easy to explore.
For open-source projects, the quality of the community is vital. Protégé has an excellent, active community. They have provided support, several examples, and lots of tutorial information.
The knowledge engineering and ontology construction, refinement, and maintenance is the hard part instead of getting the tool to work (as it should be).
Overall, I really like Protégé. If you are interested in ontology development or knowledge engineering, it is worth checking out.
