Community Profile for Ontolog

By / Date: Peter P. Yim / 2005.11.06

Last Updated: 2005.11.06-08:38am PST

• Community (name): Ontolog (a.k.a. OntologForum)
• Date Established: April 2002
• Key Stakeholders: 3 co-conveners (see contact below), Volunteers making up of Ontologists, Standards Committee members (esp. in XML), CIM3 (hosting the community's collaborative work environment since its inception.)
• Constituency: Open, international community. Anyone interested can participate, either as active members or as observers. Thought leaders in the domain have been participating by invitation.
• Domain: formal and informal ontology; application; strategy and policy; adoption & standardization
• Mission / Charter: Ontolog (a.k.a. Ontolog Forum) Charter: (see: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nidB)
  • Ontolog is an open, international, virtual community of practice, whose membership will:
    • Discuss practical issues and strategies associated with the development and application of both formal and informal ontologies.
    • Identify ontological engineering approaches that might be applied to the UBL effort, as well as to the broader domain of eBusiness standardization efforts.
    • Strive to advance the field of ontological engineering and semantic technologies, and to help move them into main stream applications.

• With respect to Ontology work (esp. eGov-related work), the community's:
  • Medium Term Goal: advance the science and art of ontological engineering and semantic technologies; moving them into the mainstream through adoption by standards bodies
  • Short Term Goal: provide an open, non-commercial CoP space for the community at large; educate and evangelize ontological engineering and semantic technologies through regular community events.
  • Deliverables within the next 6 months: monthly invited speaker sessions; monthly scheduled discussion sessions; ad hoc evangelistic activities (reports, presentations, position papers with recommendations, ...etc.); joint activities to provide input into SICoP, DRM-IT2, HITOP, ... etc.
• Key Differentiation (with the other communities presenting today):
  • practically no out-of-pocket cost to participate
  • adamant about collaboration, sharing and open knowledge
  • activities are community driven; we are neutral, open, and we are not answerable to any authority or institutional structure, except for (explicitly) our charter & IPR policy, and (implicitly) our professional integrity.
• What we can bring to the table to foster collaboration with other communities here today:
  • our open collaborative attitude - we can and will gladly work with other communities sharing similar attitudes and goals
  • our established infrastructure and community membership of a lot of the key players in the domain
  • our agility: we can put together a fairly substantial virtual event in short order (say, 2 weeks.)
• Additional Remarks:
  • besides our prime mission around ontologies, some have found our community, our collaborative work environment and our processes to be a best practice example on how the Internet can be leveraged to help bootstrap collective intelligence.
• Contact: any of the 3 co-conveners - Peter P. Yim, Kurt Conrad, Leo Obrst