INTRODUCTION

Recent surveys (Hopt et al. 2004; Denger 2004a, Denger 2004b) of online and offline information services in the domain of European ethics have identified over 200 information systems and services providing access to a wide range of information resources. Another survey of user behaviours and preferences (Burgess et al. 2004) identified the number of frequent and occasional users of fourteen sites, while another 235 sites were identified by respondents themselves as sites that they consulted.

The information resources provided by these services differ in degree of coverage (e.g., some resources, such as AGROVOC, principally concern other domains but contain information related to ethics), sub-discipline (e.g., medical ethics, legal ethics), type (e.g., databases, link collections, images), and content (e.g., journals, institutions, expert information, project descriptions, thesauri). What is immediately evident from these surveys is the distributed, heterogeneous nature of the resources comprising this domain, and that no single search engine could retrieve a comprehensive set of the resources relevant to a user's needs. Users who are looking for information on, say, French researchers working on stem cells, have at their disposal search engines that can go through these files (and indeed, the millions of files on the WWW) at the blink of an eye. Yet, there is little guarantee that what the search engines will find and display will correspond in meaningful ways to the user's query: She may enter the query stem cell researchers in France but the resources that might constitute good responses to her query refer to French researchers and employ the plural form stem cells; or, alternatively, it may be the case that relevant information is included within the results displayed, but that she has to manually sift through a dozen pages of irrelevant results (e.g., pages containing her query in the form of a bag of words, i.e., stem, cell^[1], researchers, and French, appearing as separate terms) to get to them; or, the page might contain biased or inaccurate statements about the topic.

Up until now, the WWW has been a system for the global dissemination of electronic information, meant for human consumption. The ease of publishing content on the Web has led to an explosion in the quantity and heterogeneity of information published that is far beyond what humans are able and willing to process. To handle these huge quantities of information intelligently and efficiently, the WWW needs to transform itself into a system for disseminating knowledge that can be interpreted not only by humans but also and especially by computers. This implies an evolution to a web that is first and foremost meaning based rather than form based. Once the semantics of web content is exposed, the foundation for data interoperability, reuse, and categorization is laid.

An intelligent WWW, that is, one using semantic technologies, could then process the query stem cell researchers in France. Based on its "understanding" of the query (e.g., through a process of resolving the query terms into concepts and matching those concepts to an ontology over which reasoning can be performed), it could conduct not only a comprehensive search of all of the above mentioned 200-some services, but also retrieve/suggest related concepts and resources, irrespective of the actual terms and language of the query. In addition, the system could engage the user in a dialog to help her refine her query.

The aim of this paper is to specify the rationale and the methodologies for developing semantic standards in the domain of European ethics in the fields of science, research, and technology. In particular, we propose, on the one hand, a European Ethics Application Profile (EEAP) to address the problem of semantic heterogeneity. On the other hand, from the EEAP, we derive a corresponding ontology, the European Ethics Application Ontology (EEAO). The application profile upon which the application ontology is based makes explicit the semantics that already exists within the application profile, and may be further enriched with additional semantics through the introduction of schemes, thesauri, and other terminologies. Thus, the semantic richness of the application ontology varies according to the extent to which additional concepts and relations have been incorporated into the ontology. We will refer to this EEAO alternatively as a root ontology, since it serves as a starting point for further semantic extensions.

Developing and applying standards for resource description is a prerequisite for creating the infrastructure for a network of information services that can alleviate the semantic heterogeneity of the diverse and distributed services providing information resources in European ethics. Moreover, this emphasis on meaning over form allows for the development of "smart" applications for areas such as content management (e.g., automatic mark-up of documents), knowledge management (e.g., expert locators, concept-based search), and advisors/recommenders (e.g., mediators).