Lifecycle Support for Networked Ontologies (NeOn) project kick-off meeting

From 20-22 March 2006, FAO will host the launch of the NeOn (Lifecycle Support for Networked Ontologies) project, by coordinating a kick off meeting at which all the members of the Consortium will be participating. NeOn is a project funded by the European Commission under the "Sixth Framework Programme IST-2004-2.4. Semantic-based knowledge and content systems". The aim of NeOn is to create the first ever service-oriented, open infrastructure and associated methodology, to support the development life-cycle of this new generation of semantic applications. Its overall goal is to extend the state of the art through economically viable solutions. These applications will rely on a network of contextualized ontologies, exhibiting local but not necessarily global consistency. NeOn will be tested across two different sectors pharmaceuticals and agriculture/fisheries, whose realistic and large-volume data sets are not manageable using todays technology. In particular, the Work Package 7 of the project, lead by FAO, will implement an Ontology-driven fish stock depletion alert system. The Neon Consortium involves a mix of key players in the knowledge technology field, from academia, industry and international organizations: The Open University (UK), Universitaet Karlsruhe (Germany), Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (Spain), Software AG (Germany), Intelligent Software Components, S.A (Spain), Josef Stefan Institute (Slovenia), Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (France), University of Sheffield (UK), Universitaet Koblenz-Landau (Germany), Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR) (Italy), Ontoprise GmbH (Germany), Asociacin Espaola de Comercio Electrnico (Spain), Atos Origin, s.a.e. (Spain) and the Food and Agriculture Organization for the United Nations (FAO)(Italy).