Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters enter into cooperation for development of open ontologies for nanoscience and nanotechnology

The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (DNVA) will cooperate with NQCG to make sure the wider international scientific community engage in development of open scientifically based standards and classifications for nanotechnology specified in open computational ontologies.

The involvement of the international scientific community ensures a high level of collaboration and quality in the resulting ontologies while helping to bridge the gap between academia and industry to foster innovation, knowledge exchange and economic development.

An exploratory ontology effort in this field under the leadership of Norway (under leadership of NQCG Chairman Axel P. Mustad) is already running within the 80004 Vocabularies Series for Nanotechnology — the joint activities by ISO/TC 229 and IEC/TC 113 in standardising an international vocabulary (terminology and nomenclature system) for nanotechnology.

The nano field is highly interdisciplinary and is rapidly expanding its domain of influence. Consequently, new and previous results in the field are scattered over a growing number of different scientific and technical journals and databases. Since each discipline has its own terminology, concepts and focus, manual scanning of all documents with textual occurrences of an actual nanotechnological property, material or method is a difficult and uncertain way to collect up-to-date information for research, engineering or investment. Currently, however, this is the only way to harvest the accumulating knowledge in the nano field. With a fully developed nano ontology server in place, a coherent terminology and classification standard can be maintained across sub disciplines, allowing efficient, reliable data collection and improved interdisciplinary communication.

Ontologies are the central elements in any open infrastructure for information exchange across disciplines, organisational and geographical borders. In the nanotechnology research field there is still no ontology standard in place, in spite of a strong need to coordinate and relate the diverse research conducted in this interdisciplinary field. Ontologies are used to realise improved data integration and interoperability and can potentially bring big savings for both the industry and the public sectors. Realising this potential requires efficient ontology construction, merging and evolution technologies.

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