The Musen Lab

Mark Musen’s laboratory studies methods for building intelligent computer systems that support the work of clinicians and basic scientists. The overall goal is to support e-science and clinical decision making using systems that store encoded knowledge. The laboratory investigates the use of components for building knowledge-based systems, controlled terminologies and ontologies, and technology for the Semantic Web.

For more than two decades, Musen’s group has worked to elucidate reusable building blocks for constructing intelligent systems, and to develop scalable computational architectures for systems that can address significant application tasks in biomedicine. An important element of that work has led to the development of the Protégé system, an open-source platform used around the world for the construction and maintenance of electronic knowledge bases, ontologies, and Semantic Web applications. Protégé provides a platform from which to study problems in knowledge modeling, ontology integration and alignment, and the construction of large-scale and distributed intelligent systems.