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Chapter 12 Web Protégé  
 
This tutorial has primarily focused on the desktop version of Protégé because as of this writing Web 
Protégé doesn’t support any reasoners so the majority of the sophisticated capabilities of OWL and 
Protégé such as defined classes and SWRL rules can’t be created in Web Protégé. However, one of my 
goals in creating this tutorial was to address questions that I’ve seen frequently asked on the Protégé user 
support email list and one of the most common question is the difference between Protégé and Web 
Protégé.  We are all used to using tools as services rather than applications installed on our local 
machines, so people often go to Web Protégé as their default. While Web Protégé lacks reasoner support 
it can still be extremely useful for collaborative development. This chapter explains the benefits of Web 
Protégé and some best practices for using the two tools together.  
To begin it is recommended that new users start with the desktop version of Protégé13. The constraints 
imposed on the ontology by lack of a reasoner are significant and if one learns only using Web Protégé 
they will miss many of the benefits of OWL and come away with the idea that Protégé is little more than 
a traditional object modeling tool. However, once one is familiar with the desktop version it is worth 
getting familiar with Web Protégé as it can be extremely useful for joint development of an ontology by 2 
or more people.  
To begin there are two options for Web Protégé:  
1. Use the Stanford server at webprotege.stanford.edu 
2. Download and install the Web Protégé software on your own local server. 
Figure 12.1 Web Protégé Projects 
Unless you have security requirements at your organization that prohibit you from using the hosted 
version at Stanford it is best to start with the Stanford server. I won’t go into the details of how to install a 
local Web Protégé server because either way the functionality is the same. To start, let’s create a project 
in Web Protégé for the Pizza tutorial with data ontology. When you first go to webprotege.stanford.edu 
 
13 From this point on I will refer to the Desktop version of Protégé as just Protégé.