Ontology Summit 2012:



"Ontology for Big Systems"



Co-organized by Ontolog, NIST, NCOR, NCBO, IAOA & NCO_NITRD, the 2012 Ontology Summit is in session between Jan-12 and Apr-13 this year. This is the 7th in the series of 3-month open annual events, by and for the Ontology Community and their collaborators

Description, Goals & Objectives:

This year's Ontology Summit is titled "Ontology for Big Systems" and seeks to explore, identify and articulate how ontological methods can bring value to the various disciplines required to engineer a "big system." The term "big system" is intended to cover a large scope that includes many of the terms encountered in the media such as big data, complex techno-socio-economic systems, intelligent or smart systems, cloud computing, netcentricity and collective intelligence. Established disciplines that fall within the summit scope include (but not limited to) systems engineering, software engineering, information systems modelling, and data mining.

The principal goal of the summit is to bring together and foster collaboration between the ontology community, systems community, and stakeholders of some of the "big systems." Together, the summit participants will exchange ideas on how ontological analysis and ontology engineering might make a difference, when applied in these "big systems." We will aim towards producing a series of recommendations describing how ontologies can create an impact; as well as providing illustrations where these techniques have been, or could be, applied in domains such as bioinformatics, electronic health records, intelligence, the smart electrical grid, manufacturing and supply chains, earth and environmental, e-science, cyberphysical systems and e-government. As is traditional with the Ontology Summit series, the results will be captured in the form of a communiqué, with expanded supporting material provided on the web.

Process & Deliverables:

This is our 7th annual OntologySummit season. Similar to our last 6 summits, this OntologySummit will comprise of 3 months of virtual discourse (over our archived mailing lists) and virtual panel sessions (over augmented conference calls), and culminate in a 2-day face-to-face workshop/symposium held on April 12 & 13, 2012 at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the greater Washington, DC Area (Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA to be exact) during which we, among other things, will distill our thoughts into a collaboratively developed communiqué.


Come join us at the weekly virtual panel discussions (every Thursday), and the culmination event - the OntologySummit2012 Workshop and Symposium.