June SWAO Monthly Report

The Semantic Web Applied Ontology (SWAO) Special Interest Group is working to develop a set of guidelines and explanatory documents regarding ontologies. Members of the SIG have prepared overviews of the various purposes and landscapes in which ontologies are developed and used (for example, in semantic application use cases, or for data integration, AI enhancement and explainability, and business knowledge representation), learnings from lexicography, and how ontologies can provide formal definitions of a domain’s concepts, relationships and facts. Within the SIG, there has been much discussion of different approaches to ontology articulation (e.g., how and why an ontology is defined) and its communication. These discussions have addressed ontology purpose and intended audience, various methods of communication (e.g., RDFS, OWL, OWL with rules, Common Logic, etc. or perhaps simple spreadsheets), ability to reuse and maintain ontologies, and much more. The goal of the work is to create a paper articulating the diversity of approaches used in ontology development and its expression. This paper should be available later this year.