4 
 
Chapter 1 Introduction 
 
This introduces Protégé 5 for creating OWL ontologies as well as various plugins. If you have questions 
specific to this tutorial, please feel free to email me directly: mdebellissf@gmail.com  However, if you 
have general questions about Protégé, OWL, or plugins you should subscribe to and send an email to the 
User Support for Protégé and Web Protégé email list. This list has many people (including me) who 
monitor it and can contribute their knowledge to help you understand how to get the most out of this 
technology. To subscribe to the list, go to: https://protege.stanford.edu/support.php and click on the first 
orange Subscribe button. That will enable you to subscribe to the list and give you the email to send 
questions to.  
This chapter covers licensing and describes conventions used in the tutorial. Chapter 2 covers the 
requirements for the tutorial and describes the Protégé user interface. Chapter 3 gives a brief overview of 
the OWL ontology language. Chapter 4 focuses on building an OWL ontology with classes and object 
properties. Chapter 4 also describes using a Description Logic Reasoner to check the consistency of the 
ontology and automatically compute the ontology class hierarchy.  
Chapter 5 describes data properties. Chapter 6 describes design patterns and shows one design pattern: 
adding an order to an enumerated class. Chapter 7 describes the various concepts related to the name of 
an OWL entity.  
Chapter 8 introduces an extended version of the Pizza tutorial developed in chapters 1-7. This ontology 
has a small number of instances and property values already created which can be used to illustrate the 
tools in the later chapters for writing rules, doing queries, and defining constraints.  
Chapter 9 describes two tools for doing queries: Description Logic queries and SPARQL queries. Chapter 
10 introduces the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) and walks you through creating SWRL and 
SQWRL rules. Chapter 11 introduces the Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL) and discusses the 
difference between defining logical axioms in Description Logic and data integrity constraints  in 
SHACL. Chapter 12 has some concluding thoughts and opinions and Chapter 13 provides a bibliography.  
1.1 Licensing 
This document is freely available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International 
Public License. I typically distribute it as a PDF but if you want to make your own version send me an 
email and I will send you the Word version. For details on licensing see: 
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode  
1.2 Conventions 
Class, property, rule, and individual names are written in Consolas font like this. The term used for 
any such construct in Protégé and in this document is an Entity. Individuals and classes can also be 
referred to as objects. 
Names for user interface tabs, views, menu selections, buttons, and text entry are highlighted like this.  
Any time you see highlighted text such as File>Preferences or OK or PizzaTopping it refers to something 
that you should or optionally could view or enter into the user interface.  If you ever aren’t sure what to 
do to accomplish some task look for the highlighted text. Often, as with PizzaTopping the text you 
enter into a field in the Protégé UI will be the name of a class, property, etc. In those cases, where the