NeOn addresses the R&D cycle of semantic applications, in an open environment of highly contextualized, evolving and networked ontologies. To this purpose, the project is creating a service-centred reference architecture that includes methods and tools for ontology evolution, collaborative development, contextual adaptation of semantic resources, etc.

This presentation will primarily demonstrate the use of NeOn technologies in two case studies in the pharmaceutical sector. First, we aim at cataloguing information about pharmaceutical products in order to provide European associations of pharmacy professionals with access to homogenized information repositories. NeOn produces a global vademecum where distributed databases and regulations can be integrated and kept up-to-date.

Second, since a European directive in 2002 authorised the use of digitally signed invoices for commercial transactions, the use of electronic invoices has grown exponentially, leading to a high level of heterogeneity in formats. Networked ontologies enable actors involved in a transaction to automatically process arbitrary invoices by abstracting the underlying information from the details of their particular encoding and technologies.