Protégé has two different meanings. The first one refers to a free, open-source ontology editor and a knowledge management system). It was first built by Mark Musen in 1987 and has since been developed by a team at Stanford University. The software is the most popular and widely used ontology editor in the world. Protégé provides a graphic user interface to define ontologies. It also includes deductive classifiers to validate that models are consistent and to infer new information based on the analysis of an ontology. This application is written in Java and makes heavy use of Swing to create the user interface. According to their website, there are over 300,000 registered users).
The second meaning of Protégé is a person who receives special protection and promotion from someone more established in a field. If someone is introduced as a protégé, it means that they are off to a good start in their career. Essentially, a protégé is a teacher’s pet, someone who is given special status or favors. Often, the word is used for someone who has special standout talent and is taken up as an upcoming star or powerhouse.
