Semantic approach to bioethics in the Ethicsweb project Building a semantic architecture for a European documentation system

The purpose of this paper is to present the activities of the European project Ethicsweb, funded under the 7th Framework Program of the European Commission, placing special emphasis on the semantic approach provided by this project. The objectives of Ethicsweb are basically those of: (a) facilitating access to information on ethics in science through an integrated infrastructure; (b) developing sophisticated tools, both technical and semantic to establish the above mentioned infrastructure; (c) creating a European Reference Center for Bioethics, in order to collect the information provided by various local centers and international organizations; (d) developing multilingual tools (thesauri and ontologies) for indexing and searching of documents in bioethics. In this paper the authors will present the steps undertaken until now, such as application profiles, XML schemes and examples.