Semantic and Organisational Interoperability in Communicating and Collaborating Organisations (Semicolon) is a research project partly funded by the Norwegian Research Council. It addresses the challenges to establish compatible ontologies, information models and the necessary organisational coordination and collaboration to simplify public service production across several public bodies.

  Four large and influential public bodies provide collaboration cases as study items for the project: the Directorate of Taxes, the Brønnøysund Register Centre, the Directorate for Health and Social Affairs and Statistics Norway. The organisations performing the research are Det Norske Veritas (DNV, the coordinator and project owner), the company Karde (initiator of the project), consultancy Ekor and the Norwegian Centre for Informatics in Health and Social Care, KITH. The University of Oslo and the Norwegian School of Management as well as the universities of Manchester and Aberdeen provide expertise in semantics, object orientation and organisational theory.   The project will develop ICT-based methods, tools and metrics through research based experiences in real collaboration cases where the aim is to produce public electronic services to industries and citizens. Due to stove-piped budgeting and evaluation principles in the public sector, the Semicolon project will address collaboration and coordination issues that would not have been addressed by the individual organisations alone.   Expectations Development and testing of ICT-based methods, tools and metrics to obtain faster and cheaper semantic and organisational interoperability both with and within the public sector. Identify obstacles for interoperability and strategy, measures and tools to tackle these Develop and apply metrics and indicators to measure the effects of interoperability (including use of ontologies)

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