The main goal of Semicolon is to develop and test ICT-based methods, tools and metrics to obtain faster and cheaper semantic and organisational interoperability both with and within the public sector.

Semicolon's sub-goals are to:

• Identify obstacles for interoperability and strategy/solutions to
  tackle these.
• Develop methods and tools to establish effective and efficient
  interoperability.
• Develop metrics and indicators to measure the effects of
  interoperability (including use of ontologies).
• Apply methods and tools to develop ontologies and models for use in concretes cases in public organisations.
• Measure effects by the use of the metric.
• Disseminate results and experiences to public sector, ICT industry and academia.
• Create an arena with influential public organisations, competent
  companies and research networks, as a locomotive for semantic and organisational interoperability in public sector.

Four large and influential public bodies are engaged in Semicolon. These will provide real world collaboration example cases as study items for the project. The public bodies are the Brønnøysund Register Centre, the Directorate for Health and Social Affairs, the Directorate for Taxes, Statistics Norway and The Norwegian Association of Local and Regional Authorities (KS).

Organisations performing the R&D-work are Det Norske Veritas (DNV) which is the coordinator and project owner, Karde AS (innovation-based consulting and management), Ekor AS (consulting within public sector), and KITH (Norwegian Centre for Informatics in Health and Social Care) which works mostly for and recieve grants from Norwegian Directorate for Health. Two Norwegian universities, the University of Oslo and the Norwegian School of Management provide expertise in semantics, object orientation and organisational theory.

The SEMICOLON-consortium is multidisciplinary. It aims at identification of obstacles in real collaboration cases, and at the development of new methodologies, tools and metrics. The development work shall be based on prototypes, and the results shall be verified in real collaboration cases. SEMICOLON allows differences in collaborating organisations, such as different values, different goals, and different aspects of the same concept.