Knowledge intensive sectors, such as the pharmaceutical, have typically to face the problem of dealing with heterogeneous and vast amounts of information. In these scenarios integration, discovery and an easy access to knowledge are the most important factors. The use of semantics to classify meaningfully the information and to bridge the gap between the different representations that different stakeholders have is widely accepted. The problem arises when the ontologies used to model the domain become too large and unmanageable. The current status of the technology does not allow to easily working with this type of ontologies.In this chapter we propose the use of networked ontologies to solve these problems for the particular case scenario of the nomenclature of products in the pharmaceutical sector in Spain. Instead of using a single ontology, the idea is to break the model in several meaningful pieces and bind them together using a networked ontology model for representing and managing relations between multiple ontologies. The semantic nomenclature is a case study that is currently under development in the EC funded FP6 project NeOn1. Among the main objectives of the case study, are helping in the systematization of the creation, maintenance and keeping up-to-date drug-related information, and to allow an easy integration of new drug resources. In order to do that, the case study tackles the engineering of a drug Reference Ontology, the provision of easy mechanisms for discovery, model and mapping of drug resources in a collaborative way, and the ability to reason on the context of user and ontologies to ease the mapping and retrieving processes.
Mapping social innovation networks: Knowledge intensive social services as systems builders