About the OOA

The OOA is an international not-for-profit association that consists of industry, government, and research leaders and innovators with respect to ontology development, use, or education.

The general mission of the OOA is to develop strategies for ontology recommendation and standardization, and promote the ontology technology to industry.

The OOA is organized as a number of domain chapters and working groups. A domain chapter is responsible for implementing the OOA mission in a vertical market sector, such as, HR, eHealth, digital libraries, legal, finance, etc. A working group focuses on a certain issue that is horizontal for several or all domain chapters; examples are Ontology Evaluation and Quality, interoperability, Domain Upper-Levels, etc.

The OOA is a KnowledgeWeb initiative. KnowledgeWeb (FP6-507482, http://knowledgeweb.semanticweb.org/) is a European Commission-funded Network of Excellence and the world's largest coordinated research effort on Semantic Web Technology and on ontology in particular.

Charter

The OOA is an international not-for-profit association (Belgian VzW) that consists of industry, government, and research leaders and innovators with respect to ontology development, use, or education.

Purpose (article 3)

  1. To promote science and research on ontology engineering, with a particular focus on ontology content;
  2. To develop and promote quality (and methodological) guidelines for ontology content and tools, including evaluation and recommendation strategies;
  3. To evaluate, recommend, and/or standardize ontology content and tools;
  4. To provide publication infrastructure for ontology content.
  5. To become a representative forum for experts within this field;
  6. To organize chapter committees and working groups on subjects related to its purpose;
  7. To distribute, and make available, knowledge about ontologies through publications, the organization of seminars, courses and conferences, and any other means that serve this purpose.
  8. To collaborate with scientific and other institutions, organizations and societies, as well as with industrial companies, national and international bodies with similar or related purpose.

The OOA may perform any and all actions that directly or indirectly pertain to its purpose. It can among other things provide collaboration and have interest in any purpose related to its own. The OOA is authorized to keep under guardian all realty and moving goods, that can be necessary or useful in the accomplishment of the goal.