SWAO:Charter

SWAO Charter

Charter of the Semantic Web Applied Ontology SIG

The Semantic Web Applied Ontology SIG aims to bridge the gap between the Semantic Web and the IAOA communities. This SIG's goals are to actively support communication and collaboration and to promote the use of applied ontology, with our colleagues in the Semantic Web (including Linked Data) community. In addition, we want to better understand how the Semantic Web community’s problem spaces impact applied ontology. And conversely, how applied ontology can enhance the efforts of these communities and others. (We view applied ontology as using ontological analysis methods and reasoning to address real-world problems.)

Often the two communities perceive that they have little in common, whereas potentially there is much in common - including goals, techniques, technologies, and interest in well-engineered ontologies and their uses. Many of us in IAOA promote and use Semantic Web technologies. Similarly, many in the Semantic Web community advocate more rigorous and principled ontologies (based on ontological analysis), and use semantic technologies and reasoning to address many issues such as dealing with vast amounts of heterogeneous data on the Web. Our goal is to assist each side in bringing their perspectives to the table, and thus facilitate two-way collaboration and technology integration.

In order to promote communication, this SIG is event-focused. We are concentrating on bringing together the individuals, techniques and technologies of both communities for mutually beneficial interchanges. Our activities focus on organizing and supporting joint workshops, collaborative authoring of journal articles across the communities, and hosting related activities such as participation in summer schools in both communities, and joint tutorials which would help build bridges.