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Ontologies have seen quite an enormous development and application in many domains within the last years, especially in the context of the next web generation, the Semantic Web. Besides the work of countless researchers across the world, industry starts developing ontologies to support their daily operative business. Currently, most ontologies exist in pure form without any additional information, eg missing domain specific or application related information, such as provided by Dublin Core for text documents, denoting the difficulty for academia and industry to identify, find and apply–basically meaning to reuse–ontologies effectively and efficiently. Our contribution consists of a proposal for a metadata standard, so called Ontology Metadata Vocabulary (OMV) which is based on discussions and agreement in the EU IST thematic network of excellence Knowledge Web1. OMV is available for download at http://ontoware. org/projects/omv. The current version 0.7 has been validated as OWL Lite by the WonderWeb OWL Ontology Validator (see http://phoebus. cs. man. ac. uk: 9999/OWL/Validator).