Stanford's Protege A.I. package

Protégé is a nice little knowledge base kind of program.



It is a little hard to describe precisely what Protégé is. They say it is a knowedge acquisition program. Well, that is something - but I think there is a lot more to it. I can tell you things about it. That might make its possibilities and characteristics a little clearer.



It uses the CLIPS (A.I. expert system shell programming language) file format to store its knowledge.

It has aspects of object-oriented programming (concrete and abstract classes, instances, inheritence) and list processing (such as frames and slots) built into it.

It stores information in a knowledge base, which you can subsequently retrieve by writing queries.

It can interface to databases, using JDBC, which in turn uses SQL.

There are free plugins for it that can do fancy new knowledge management standards like OWL and stuff from the mid-1990s like RDF.

It is written in Java.

It runs on the Macintosh, MS-Windows, etc.

It is free.

It's on version 2.0, with 2.1 already in beta. So it is clean and pretty expansive in its capabilities.



Here is where it is based so you can learn more about it: http://protege.stanford.edu/



My recommendation is, if you are a programmer and you are not a novice and have become acquainted with object-oriented programming, information technology, and some kind of list processing or A.I. programming or programming language - that you check it out. You will probably find it a very fluid, smoothly interactive, and uncomplicated way of defining a structure for information and adding it very quickly. These days, that is important stuff.

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