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A Practical Guide to Building OWL Ontologies 
Using Protégé 5.5 and Plugins 
Edition 3.0 
8 April 2021 
Michael DeBellis 
 
This is a revised version of the Protégé 4 Tutorial version 1.3 by Matthew Horridge. Previous versions of 
the tutorial were developed by Holger Knublauch , Alan Rector , Robert Stevens, Chris Wroe, Simon 
Jupp, Georgina Moulton, Nick Drummond, and Sebastian Brandt. 
This work was conducted using the Protégé resource, which is supported by grant GM10331601 from the 
National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the United States National Institutes of Health. 
Chapters 3-5 are based on the original tutorial. I have updated the tutorial to be consistent with Protégé 5. 
I have also made some changes to address some of the most common issues I’ve seen new users grapple 
with, to remove some of the dated information about older frame-based versions of Protégé, and various 
miscellaneous changes. Chapters 6-11 are new. I have added new sections for technologies such as 
SWRL, SPARQL and SHACL as well as some details on concepts such as IRIs and namespaces.  
Thanks to Matthew Horridge and everyone who worked on the previous tutorials. Special thanks to 
Lorenz Buehmann  who helped me work out a thorny problem as I developed the revised example, to 
André Wolski for help with the SHACL plugin. Special thanks to Dick Ooms and Colin Pilkington for 
their excellent detailed feedback on previous versions of the tutorial. Also, thanks to everyone on the 
Protégé user support email list.  
Note: this document may get updates frequently. It is a good idea to check my blog at: 
https://www.michaeldebellis.com/post/new-protege-pizza-tutorial to make sure you have the latest 
version.  
If you have questions or comments feel free to contact me at mdebellissf@gmail.com