Impact: Economic, Technological, Health and wellbeing
Narrative
Ontologies are used to describe the meaning of terms in a domain. Manchester has had a leading role in the design of ontology languages, algorithms and tools. Through standardization, algorithm development and tool creation, we have significantly influenced the uptake of the Ontology Web Language (OWL) and Semantic Web Technologies by public service providers and industry. For example, the NCI thesaurus and SNOMED CT are medical terminologies in OWL; specialised semantic web companies such as Clark & Parsia, Racer Systems and TopQuadrant provide semantic technologies and services that build on OWL; and companies such as Oracle and B2i Healthcare include tool support for OWL.