Working Groups

W3C OWL working group (W3C OWL)

The OWL Web Ontology Language is playing an important role in an increasing number and range of applications, and is the focus of research into tools, reasoning techniques, formal foundations and language extensions. The widespread use of OWL has revealed requirements for language extensions that are needed in applications. At the same time, research and development into reasoning techniques and practical algorithms has made it possible to provide tool support for language features that would not have been feasible at the time OWL was published.

The mission of the OWL Working Group, part of the Semantic Web Activity, is to produce a W3C Recommendation that refines and extends OWL. The proposed extensions are a small set that:

1. have been identified by users as widely needed, and
2. have been identified by tool implementers as reasonable and feasible extensions to current tools.

W3C Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences (HCLS) Interest Group (W3C HCLS)

The mission of the Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group, part of the Semantic Web Activity, is to develop, advocate for, and support the use of Semantic Web technologies for biological science, translational medicine and health care. These domains stand to gain tremendous benefit by adoption of Semantic Web technologies, as they depend on the interoperability of information from many domains and processes for efficient decision support.

The group will develop:

• Document use cases to aid individuals in understanding the business and technical benefits of using Semantic Web technologies.
• Document guidelines to accelerate the adoption of the technology.
• Implement a selection of the use cases as proof-of-concept demonstrations.
• Explore the possibility of developing high level vocabularies.
• Disseminate information about the group's work at government, industry, and academic events.