MAKING HETEROGENEOUS ONTOLOGIES INTER- OPERABLE THROUGH STANDARDISATION A META ONTOLOGY LANGUAGE TO BE STANDARDISED: ONTO- LOGY INTEGRATION AND INTEROPERABILITY (OntoIOp)

Assistive technology, especially for persons with disabilities, increasingly relies on electronic communication among users, between users and their devices, and among these devices. Making such ICT accessible and inclusive often requires remedial programming, which tends to be costly or even impossible. We, therefore, aim at more interoperable devices, services accessing these devices, and content delivered by these services, at the levels of 1. data and metadata, 2. datamodels and data modelling methods and 3. metamodels as well as a meta ontology language. Even though ontologies are widely being used to enable content interoperability, there is currently no unified framework for ontology interoperability itself. This paper outlines the design considerations underlying OntoIOp (Ontology Integration and Interoperability), a new standardisation activity in ISO/TC 37/SC 3 to become an international standard, which aims at filling this gap.