Big Data and Semantic Web Meet Applied Ontology

Since the beginnings of the Semantic Web, ontologies have played key roles in the design and deployment of new semantic technologies. Yet over the years, the level of collaboration between the Semantic Web and Applied Ontology communities has been much less than expected. Within Big Data applications, ontologies appear to have had little impact.

This year's Ontology Summit is an opportunity for building bridges between the Semantic Web, Linked Data, Big Data, and Applied Ontology communities. On the one hand, the Semantic Web, Linked Data, and Big Data communities can bring a wide array of real problems (such as performance and scalability challenges and the variety problem in Big Data) and technologies (automated reasoning tools) that can make use of ontologies. On the other hand, the Applied Ontology community can bring a large body of common reusable content (ontologies) and ontological analysis techniques. Identifying and overcoming ontology engineering bottlenecks is critical for all communities.

Ontology Summit 2014 will pose and address the primary challenges in these areas of interaction among the different communities. The Summit activities will bring together insights and methods from these different communities, synthesize new insights, and disseminate knowledge across field boundaries.

Following earlier Ontology Summit practice, the synthesized results of this season's discourse will be published as a Communiqué.