The Sensory Stimulation Vocabulary Community Group aims to develop shared terminology for sensory stimulation research, software, hardware, and public-interest applications. This includes open vocabularies, ontology modules, semantic models, JSON-LD contexts, SHACL validation profiles, and implementation guidance for describing sessions, stimuli, techniques, modalities, parameters, devices, safety metadata, evidence annotations, and related datasets on the Web.
The group’s core intent is to make sensory stimulation more coherent and interoperable. It aims to:
Help research become easier to share, compare, annotate, reproduce, and represent across studies and contexts.
Help software and hardware systems communicate using shared sensory stimulation metadata.
Help researchers, developers, authorities, institutions, public-interest organizations, and the public discuss sensory stimulation technologies with clearer terminology and evidence/safety boundaries.
The group may publish specifications, reports, use cases, examples, validation profiles, and implementation guidance. Relevant technologies may include RDF, OWL, SKOS, SHACL, JSON-LD, persistent identifiers, and mappings to existing Web vocabularies.
We welcome researchers, sensory stimulation developers, audio/visual/haptic technology experts, semantic-web practitioners, accessibility specialists, device and application developers, open-science communities, public-interest organizations, and institutions interested in responsible semantic infrastructure.
Scope boundary: This group is a technical community group focused on vocabulary, metadata, semantic interoperability, and implementation guidance. Its work may help make sensory stimulation easier to document, compare, and evaluate by external researchers, institutions, or authorities. The group itself does not define clinical practice guidelines, certify therapeutic efficacy, prescribe medical protocols, issue public-health recommendations, or evaluate regulated-device claims.
w3c-cg/sstimGroup's public email, repo and wiki activity over time
Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these
conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.
The group’s vocabulary is published at https://w3id.org/sstim, a persistent namespace that content-negotiates: ask it for RDF and it returns the namespace catalogue in Turtle, JSON-LD or RDF/XML; ask it for HTML and it describes itself. SSTIM is an OWL 2 ontology with a multilingual SKOS vocabulary, SHACL shapes and four conformance profiles, covering stimulation techniques, stimuli and their parameters, delivery media and body placements, exposure and safety boundaries, session records, and the evidence assessments attached to claims about them. It is published under CC BY 4.0, with frozen releases archived under the concept DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21286974. Reference documentation, a knowledge browser and a SPARQL interface are at https://w3c-cg.github.io/sstim/.
A consumer implements a profile rather than the whole graph. Kernel is the dependency-free root for discovery, Core describes a stimulus and its channel, Core Plus adds the shared controlled values, and Full carries evidence, sessions and the ecosystem layer. Each profile entry point dereferences, and the machine-readable bill of materials is the suite manifest at https://w3id.org/sstim/manifest.
Terms are mapped conservatively to Wikidata, MeSH, UBERON and SNOMED CT. Every identifier is verified at the authority that mints it before it enters the graph and re-verified continuously, and where an external concept is broader or narrower the mapping says so rather than defaulting to a close match. Each mapping carries an annotated axiom naming its source, its verification date and the reason for its predicate.
The group’s first draft report, SSTIM: a vocabulary for sensory stimulation, is published alongside the vocabulary and covers the scope, the module and profile structure, what conformance to a profile means, and how the external mappings are verified: https://w3c-cg.github.io/sstim/reports/vocabulary/
Review is welcome, particularly of the scope boundaries and the external mappings. Issues and pull requests: https://github.com/w3c-cg/sstim
A brief update on the work of the W3C Sensory Stimulation Vocabulary Community Group.
The group repository is now available at w3c-cg/sstim and will serve as the main workspace for specifications, use cases, requirements, mappings, examples, validation, and implementation guidance.
Existing SSTIM materials are being contributed as initial input for discussion and further development by the Community Group. We also plan to migrate the SSTIM ontology/vocabulary and related tooling into the CG repository.
Initial priorities include preparing the Community Group charter, collecting use cases and requirements (including stakeholder interviews), refining the core model, improving interoperability with related vocabularies and standards, and preparing an initial Community Group Report.
Contributions are welcome through GitHub issues, pull requests, and the group mailing list.
The Sensory Stimulation Vocabulary Community Group aims to develop shared terminology for sensory stimulation research, software, hardware, and public-interest applications. This includes open vocabularies, ontology modules, semantic models, JSON-LD contexts, SHACL validation profiles, and implementation guidance for describing sessions, stimuli, techniques, modalities, parameters, devices, safety metadata, evidence annotations, and related datasets on the Web.
The group’s core intent is to make sensory stimulation more coherent and interoperable. It aims to:
Help research become easier to share, compare, annotate, reproduce, and represent across studies and contexts.
Help software and hardware systems communicate using shared sensory stimulation metadata.
Help researchers, developers, authorities, institutions, public-interest organizations, and the public discuss sensory stimulation technologies with clearer terminology and evidence/safety boundaries.
The group may publish specifications, reports, use cases, examples, validation profiles, and implementation guidance. Relevant technologies may include RDF, OWL, SKOS, SHACL, JSON-LD, persistent identifiers, and mappings to existing Web vocabularies.
We welcome researchers, sensory stimulation developers, audio/visual/haptic technology experts, semantic-web practitioners, accessibility specialists, device and application developers, open-science communities, public-interest organizations, and institutions interested in responsible semantic infrastructure.
Scope boundary: This group is a technical community group focused on vocabulary, metadata, semantic interoperability, and implementation guidance. Its work may help make sensory stimulation easier to document, compare, and evaluate by external researchers, institutions, or authorities. The group itself does not define clinical practice guidelines, certify therapeutic efficacy, prescribe medical protocols, issue public-health recommendations, or evaluate regulated-device claims.
This is a community initiative. This group was originally proposed on 2026-05-25 by
Renato Fabbri. The following people supported its creation: Renato Fabbri, Riccardo Berti, Juliana Andrade, Ricardo Fabbri and Rafael Reinehr.
W3C’s hosting of this group does not imply endorsement of the activities.
w3c-cg/sstim