Ontologies promise a shared and common understanding of a domain that can be communicated between people and application systems. In recent years, this promise has been explored increasingly in the network and services management domain with research into ontology-based techniques in support of a wide range of activities and processes underlying networked solutions, from improving user interaction and service flexibility to autonomic operation. The growing interest in the potential of ontologies has of course identified key engineering challenges that need to be addressed in order to make the transition from laboratory to real deployment.

This special issue aims to bring together work that can contribute to the current trend to employ ontologies in the practical engineering of management systems. Topics include:

• Relationship of ontologies and network/service information models
• Ontologies for management by intelligent agents
• Integrating business level and system/network level management knowledge
• Ontology-supported policy-based management
• Ontology-driven adaptivity and flexibility
• Ontology mapping in support of interoperation: service/service; service/user; user/user
• Engineering with ontology-based semantics
• Tools for ontology engineering
• Experiences with ontologies in Service Delivery Platforms and Service-Oriented Architectures
• Ontologies for Communication Services (IMS, Instant Messaging, VoIP)