1. Introduction
The SousLeSens Association (SLS@) is an initiative created to promote the development and adoption of semantic web technologies, ontologies, and semantic knowledge graphs in both industrial and academic environments. Founded in 2025 by experts from industry, research institutions, and universities, the association aims to build a collaborative ecosystem dedicated to knowledge engineering and semantic interoperability.
The emergence of artificial intelligence and large-scale data systems has created new challenges for organizations seeking to manage complex information and domain expertise. While modern AI technologies often rely heavily on statistical approaches and large datasets, many industrial applications require structured knowledge representations capable of supporting explainable reasoning, interoperability, and long-term knowledge governance. Semantic technologies offer a powerful framework to address these needs.
SLS@ was established to facilitate the dissemination of these technologies and to promote their practical implementation through tools, methodologies, and collaborative initiatives, especially with the SLS platform (see part 3).
2. The Role of Semantic Technologies
Semantic web technologies provide a formal and standardized framework for representing knowledge in a machine-readable form. Built upon standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), including RDF, OWL, and SPARQL, these technologies allow data and knowledge to be structured, linked, and interpreted by intelligent systems.
At the heart of this approach are ontologies, which define domain concepts, relationships, and logical rules, and semantic knowledge graphs, which connect real-world data using these conceptual models. Together, they enable systems to integrate heterogeneous data sources, capture domain expertise, and support advanced reasoning and decision-making processes.
Despite their potential, semantic technologies remain underutilized in many industries due to the complexity of existing tools and the lack of integrated environments for knowledge engineering.
One of the goals of the SousLeSens Association is to lower these barriers and make semantic technologies accessible to a wider community of practitioners.
3. The SousLeSens Platform
The SousLeSens (SLS) platform is an open-source software environment designed to support the full lifecycle of ontology engineering and semantic knowledge graph development. This platform has been developed since 2021through collaborations between industrial and academic partners. It emerged from efforts to address practical knowledge management challenges within complex industrial environments.
It provides an integrated suite of tools enabling users to design ontologies, visualize and manipulate semantic structures, integrate data sources, and query knowledge graphs.
SLS follows international semantic standards and provides graphical and collaborative interfaces that facilitate the understanding and management of complex knowledge structures. By simplifying ontology modeling and knowledge graph construction, the platform enables domain experts, engineers, and researchers to participate more actively in knowledge engineering processes.
The platform supports tasks such as knowledge structuring, semantic validation, data transformation, storage, and graph querying. It also facilitates the integration of structured and unstructured information, allowing organizations to create semantic knowledge bases that connect data with formalized domain knowledge.
4. Objectives of the SousLeSens Association
The ambition of SLS@ is to help organizations to transform domain expertise into machine- processable knowledge infrastructures to support innovation, interoperability, and long-term knowledge governance.
More practically, the SousLeSens Association (SLS@) aims to provide a governance structure for open-source semantic technologies and to promote their continuous maintenance, upgrade and dissemination – specially through the SLS platform. The association also acts as a community hub where members may share experiences, exchange knowledge, and contribute to the evolution of semantic technologies.
Among its key objectives, SLS@ seeks to promote best practices in knowledge engineering and modeling, facilitate collaboration between organizations interested in semantic technologies, and support the development of methodologies for constructing semantic knowledge graphs. All these features are native in the SLS platform.
The association also aims to encourage dialogue between industry and academia and to support the creation of an international community dedicated to the advancement of knowledge engineering.
5. Applications and Industrial Impact
The SLS platform enables organizations to transform fragmented information into coherent knowledge systems, by linking data with formalized knowledge models. These systems can improve interoperability between systems, and support decision-making processes. They can support advanced analytics, digital twins, intelligent search, and explainable AI applications.
Such systems may have applications in a wide range of domains, including energy, manufacturing, smart cities, robotics, information systems, biosciences, agriculture, aerospace, finance and defense, some of them being already very active.
6. Activities of the association
By fostering a collaborative community, SLS@ promotes its usage and the dissemination of semantic technologies, and especially seeks to ensure the sustainability of the platform.
SLS@ serves as the governance structure for the open-source development especially of the SLS platform. The association defines the roadmap for the future evolutions of the platform and encourages community participation in its development.
The association provides access to the SLS platform through an online service, enabling users to experiment with and deploy ontologies and semantic knowledge graphs.
7. SLS@ members expectations and benefits
Being a member of SLS@ allows you to define the strategic and operational framework for semantic technologies , especially through the governance of the open-source SLS platform , while also gaining access to the community members and expert network.
A member can propose a working group, benefit training, contribute to the roadmap and the features requests.
Members will be invited to participate in events and workshops, and to collaborate on research and development projects.
8. Strategic Importance in the AI Era
The growing importance of artificial intelligence and digital transformation highlights the need for robust knowledge infrastructures capable of supporting complex industrial systems. While data-driven AI approaches have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, they often lack transparency, explainability, and semantic understanding.
Knowledge engineering provides a complementary paradigm in which domain expertise is explicitly represented through ontologies and knowledge graphs. These models can guide AI systems, provide context for data interpretation, and support explainable decision-making processes.
In this context, the SousLeSens Association seeks to promote a balanced approach in which semantic knowledge models and AI technologies could work together to create more reliable and sustainable intelligent systems.
9. Board Members and Expertise
The founding members of SLS@ include professionals with extensive experience in industry, research, and standardization activities. Their expertise covers areas such as knowledge management, R&D activities, industrial data systems, ontology engineering, and semantic interoperability.
The board includes representatives from industrial organizations, universities, and research institutions, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of the initiative.