The European Ontology Network (EUON) is a community-driven, voluntary coordination between people based in Europe and working in the area of ontology and the broader area of semantics, including terminologies, vocabularies and schema. The network is intended to bring together those working across all disciplines to share their experiences, ideas and technology from both academia and industry. Members include those working in areas such as the natural sciences, physical sciences, humanities, arts, languages, social sciences, computational and mathematical sciences, but membership is open to all.

The aims of the network are as follows:

  • improve both in-discipline and cross-discipline cooperation between the members of European organisations engaged in ontology and semantic activities;
  • encourage collaboration between those presently working in, and those potentially interested in, ontology and semantics development, research and applications within Europe;
  • propose a training platform for sharing knowledge about cutting-edge techniques among semantic web experts and disseminate semantic web tools to end-users in different communities;
  • showcase the ontology work of European working groups and provide the community with a presence and better visibility on a world stage;
  • provide an interaction platform with the international semantic web community.

EUON was established following EUDAT1’s Semantic Annotation Working group meeting in Barcelona to respond to communities’ need to share and coordinate expertise and experience in the European ontology and semantics community. Re-using existing ontologies and semantics and relevant methods and tooling solutions can help the European community in reducing waste in reproducing ontologies that already exist and increasing the potential for data integration.

EUON – a community driven initiative - is chaired by James Malone and Yann Le Franc, two active members of the ontology community, who bring in the experience of working in the biomedical and computational ontology community and to support of similar developments for other scientific domains. EUON will use and support the services elaborated by the newly created EUDAT semantic workgroup (chaired by Johannes Peterseil and Yann Le Franc) and the EUDAT developers, such as the B2SHARE2 service. EUDAT’s B2SHARE service provides a simple solution to store and share ontologies. A more elaborate solution will be proposed based on the work of EUDAT semantic workgroup and feedback from the EUON community. EUON’s community driven web site and wiki will be on-line in February 2014.

For more information on EUON, please contact the chairs:

James Malone, PhD (EBI, UK): malone@ebi.ac.uk

Yann Le Franc, PhD (INCF, Sweden; University of Antwerp, Belgium): ylefranc@gmail.com