Community Profile for NCOR

By / Date: Barry Smith / 2005.11.07

Last Updated: 07 Nov 2005 12:40:35 EST;

• Community (name): National Center for Ontological Research
• Date Established: October 27, 2005
• Key Stakeholders: Academic, government and industrial organizations interested in promoting the application of the scientific method in ontology development and use
• Constituency: all adult developers and users of ontologies
• Domain: all
• Mission / Charter: (see http://ncor.us)
  • The goal of NCOR is to promote the application of scientific methods in ontology research in the United States
    • by establishing cross-disciplinary networks among those individuals and groups involved in ontological research and applications in such a way as to foster a high degree of interaction at the four levels of infrastructure, content, methodology and application
    • by fostering, through challenge evaluations and other methodologies, objective measures for the quality (usefulness, useability, reliability ...) of ontologies
    • by developing, testing and promoting best practices in ontology research and development, including conformity to reference ontologies and to top-level integration ontologies
    • by developing partnerships with institutions in academia, industry and government designed to enable the sharing of expertise and to consolidate best practices
    • by organizing and strengthening educational and training programs in ontology
    • by organizing outreach programs designed to promote greater public awareness of the importance of high-level ontology research.
• With respect to Ontology work (esp. eGov-related work), the community's:
  • Medium Term Goal: establishment of genuine evolutionary mechanisms leading to stepwise improvement of ontologies and to attrition of poor-quality ontology initiatives
  • Short Term Goal: to create an awareness of the need for quality assurance especially of the content ontologies and of the methods to achieve it
  • Deliverables within the next 6 months: to disseminate the goals of NCOR
• Key Differentiation (with the other communities presenting today): focus on scientific method, on quality of ontology content, and on objective methodologies for ontology evaluation; no restriction on domain
• What we can bring to the table to foster collaboration with other communities here today: all of the above
• Additional Remarks:
• Contact: Barry Smith <phismith-at-buffalo.edu>