The mission of the Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group, part of the Semantic Web Activity, is to develop, advocate for, and support the use of Semantic Web technologies for biological science, translational medicine and health care. These domains stand to gain tremendous benefit by adoption of Semantic Web technologies, as they depend on the interoperability of information from many domains and processes for efficient decision support.

The group will:

• Document use cases to aid individuals in understanding the business and technical benefits of using Semantic Web technologies.
• Document guidelines to accelerate the adoption of the technology.
• Implement a selection of the use cases as proof-of-concept demonstrations.
• Explore the possibility of developing high level vocabularies.
• Disseminate information about the group's work at government, industry, and academic events.

Communications of the HCLS IG are public. This includes public meeting records and access to the archives of the public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org mailing list.

The HCLS IG welcomes active participation from representatives of W3C Member organizations. If you are part of a W3C Member organization and you already have a W3C user account, you can join the HCLS IG by filling in the participation form. Otherwise, please follow the instructions on how to become a W3C Member. Active participation means participating at the weekly phone meetings, joining the discussions on the mailing list and, possibly, and participating at the face to face meetings.