News

  - May 5, 2010

    A revised FOIS-2010

    Conference Program has

    been posted.


  - February 24, 2010

    Online registration is

    now open.


  - January 25, 2010

    Call for Posters has been

    published.


  - January 19, 2010

    Workshop on Ontology

    Education - Call for

    Contributions has been

    posted.


  - January 15, 2010

    The list of accepted papers

    is now available.


  - January 6, 2010

    The deadline for final

    submissions has been

    extended to February 14th.


  - October 19, 2009

    The paper deadline has been

    extended to October 31st.

 

  - September 8, 2009

    Formatting Guidelines is 

    updated.

 

  - July 15, 2009

   John Bateman, Alan Rector,

   and Francis Jeffry Pelletier

   have been confirmed as

   Invited Speakers.


  - May 26, 2009

   Call for Papers has been

   published.

FOIS 2010 - Call for Papers

The FOIS conference series began with the first meeting in Trento, Italy, in June 1998, which was followed by meetings in 2001, 2004, 2006, and 2008. The sixth FOIS conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, during 11-14 May 2010, and we are now calling for papers to be considered for inclusion in the conference.

Ontology began life in ancient times as a fundamental part of philosophical enquiry concerned with the analysis and categorisation of what exists. In recent years, the subject has taken a practical turn with the advent of complex computerised information systems which are reliant on robust and coherent representations of their subject matter. The systematisation and elaboration of such representations and their associated reasoning techniques constitute the modern discipline of formal ontology, which is now being applied to such diverse domains as artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, bioinformatics, GIS, knowledge engineering, information retrieval, and the Semantic Web. Researchers in all these areas are becoming increasingly aware of the need for serious engagement with ontology, understood as a general theory of the types of entities and relations making up their respective domains of enquiry, to provide a solid foundation for their work.

FOIS is intended to provide a meeting point for researchers from these and other disciplines with an interest in formal ontology, where both theoretical issues and concrete applications can be explored in a spirit of genuine interdisciplinarity.

TOPICS COVERED

We seek high-quality papers on a wide range of topics. While authors may focus on fairly narrow and specific issues, all papers should emphasize the relevance of the work described to formal ontology and to information systems. Papers that completely ignore one or the other of these aspects will be considered as lying outside the scope of the meeting. Topic areas of particular interest to the conference are:

Foundational Issues

  • Kinds of entity: particulars vs universals, continuants vs occurrents, abstracta vs concreta, dependent vs independent, natural vs artificial
  • Formal relations: parthood, identity, connection, dependence, constitution, subsumption, instantiation
  • Vagueness and granularity
  • Identity and change
  • Formal comparison among ontologies
  • Ontology of physical reality (matter, space, time, motion, ...)
  • Ontology of biological reality (genes, proteins, cells, organisms, ...)
  • Ontology of artefacts, functions and roles
  • Ontology of mental reality and agency (beliefs, intentions and other mental attitudes; emotions, ...)
  • Ontology of social reality (institutions, organizations, norms,social relationships, artistic expressions, ...)
  • Ontology of the information society (information, communication, meaning negotiation, ...)
  • Ontology and Natural Language Semantics, Ontology and Cognition

Methodologies and Applications

  • Top-level vs application ontologies
  • Ontology integration and alignment; role of reference ontologies
  • Ontology-driven information systems design
  • Ontology-based application systems
  • Requirements engineering
  • Knowledge engineering
  • Knowledge management and organization
  • Knowledge representation; Qualitative modeling
  • Computational lexicons; Terminology
  • Information retrieval; Question-answering
  • Semantic web; Web services; Grid computing
  • Domain-specific ontologies, especially for: Linguistics, Geography, Law, Library science, Biomedical science, E-business, Enterprise integration, ...

DEADLINES AND FURTHER INFORMATION

Submissions: 23 October 2009
Notification of acceptance: 18 December 2009
Final camera-ready submission: 15 January 2010
Conference: 11-14 May 2010
Submitted papers should not exceed 14 pages (including bibliography). Details of the submission process, and formatting guidelines, will be provided on the conference web page (http://fois2010.mie.utoronto.ca/). Proceedings will be published by IOS Press and available at the conference.