Invitations to Membership Registration and 2018 Executive Council Elections

Before 2018 will come to an end, there are still two major “projects” concerning IAOA as an organization: (1) the full opening of membership registration and renewal and (2) the Election of the IAOA Executive Council (EC) for the two-year period of office of 2019-2020.

Membership Renewal and Registration

We are happy to announce that the main steps for relocating IAOA to Switzerland have been taken and the IAOA website, relaunched in September 2018, has matured to a functional level over the last two months. Therefore, we cordially invite former members and everyone else with an interest in IAOA, who have not (re)joined the association during 2018, to register newly as a member of the association.

Joining or renewing now will allow you to (re)gain access to the Member Area of the website and its benefits. Moreover, members have access to the [iaoa-member] mailing list and they can participate in the upcoming elections for the Executive Council, please see below.

The navigation item Join IAOA allows you to join or renew. The membership period is no longer a calendar year, but is now determined individually. Based on the annual fee, membership lasts for one year, which starts from the date at which renewal/joining application is approved by IAOA.

As indicated above, joining IAOA now means to join an international association legally domiciled in Bern, Switzerland, whereas previously IAOA was located in Trento, Italy. Please note: Basically all IAOA activities are now transferred to the new association in Switzerland, while IAOA in Italy will remain for administrative reasons for some more time. Anyone concerned about the governance of IAOA in Italy can request more information about the relation between the two associations as legal entities and can request to become also a member of the old association by writing to its new contact address: iaoa-italy <AT> iaoa.org.

Virtual Assembly for 2018 Executive Council Elections

A Virtual Assembly will soon be open in order to select members for the Executive Council (EC) of IAOA (in Switzerland). All nine positions need to be newly elected within December 2018 for the period of office of 2019-2020. These elections follow the regulations in the IAOA Statute as of Jun 23, 2016. An Election Committee is in charge of supervising the election process, which comprises of Valter Cavecchia, Roberta Ferrario, Michael Gruninger, Nicola Guarino and Leo Obrst. More detailed documentation of the process and its development is available at the wiki page IAOA Executive Council Election 2018.

In order to participate in the EC Election in any form, your IAOA membership must be up-to-date. If you have not renewed your membership during 2018, then your membership has elapsed, cf. above; please (re)join IAOA before making a nomination or otherwise participating in the election.

For the next few weeks, we foresee three main phases: Candidature, Campaigning, and Elections. Key points are summarized below, whereas more details can be found at the election wiki page.

A – Candidature Phase (Nov 26 to Dec 9, 2018)

At least two members (a proposer and at least one seconder, none of whom should be the nominee) are required in order to make a nomination. The members making the nomination shall ensure that they, as well as the nominee, are current members of the association, and that the nominee shall accept the nomination.

The list of candidates and their position statements will be made available through the election wiki page.

B – Campaigning Phase (Dec 10 to Dec 16, 2018)

Nominations can be freely discussed on the [iaoa-member] mailing list from the nomination time on. Likewise, campaigning itself can start with the first candidate nomination. Once that the candidature phase is closed, there is still one week available for (further) active campaigning and discussion on the members’ mailing list.

C – 2018 IAOA Virtual Assembly eBallot (Dec 17 to Dec 20, 2018)

In this period all members will be asked to vote for candidates for nine Executive Council positions. We kindly ask all members to participate in the vote (even in the case of abstention) – the more participants, the stronger the result of the election will be!

Results will be announced to the [iaoa-member] mailing list and at the wiki page.

All members should feel free to contact  iaoa-election <AT> ovgu.de  for any concerns regarding the 2018 EC election.

 

PLEASE START NOW
with your own membership (re)registration as well as
with nominations for the 2018 EC Election.

We will be very grateful for any efforts and contributions.

Michael Gruninger
President, IAOA
for the IAOA Executive Council

FOIS 2018 report from Cape Town

The 10th FOIS conference took place in Cape Town (South Africa) on Sept. 19-21 after the ISAO Summer school (Sept. 10-14) and two days of meetings of the JOWO workshops (Sept. 17-18). The conference ran nicely and, as usual in the past, sessions were consistently well attended with lively discussions at the end of the presentations.

The papers, which were subdivided in three areas: (i) foundations, (ii) properties and agents, (iii) methods and tools, gave a snapshot of the interests and the challenges faced in the community. As usual in the recent FOIS editions, papers addressing modeling concerns did not attempt to introduce new foundational ontologies.
Instead, they focused on comparison studies (e.g. time across ontologies) or frameworks for modeling specific notions that have not yet received much ontological attention (e.g. special types, metaphors, competition, spiritual beliefs, measure) or are still considered problematic (e.g. structural universals and states of affairs, dispositions, localities, nominal and actual qualities).

This year particular attention has raised the contribution of papers with a focus on applications and integration: the discussion of localities was based on actual problems faced by historians; the modeling of agency was based on the merging of cognitive and ontological formal systems; the use of ontology-mediated data management was applied to the integration of Research & Innovation ecosystems; the use of data mining routines was exploited for understanding the structure of data in a Semantic Web perspective; and so on.
Scientifically, the conference achieved its goals by fostering the interaction and by engaging live discussions across disciplines like computer science, philosophy, language and knowledge representation. The emphasis on application concerns that is a new turn in FOIS is shown by the participation of Pascal Hitzler as co-chair, the invited talk by Alessandro Oltramari and the assignment of the FOIS Best Paper Award to the paper “SAREF4health: IoT standard-based ontology-driven healthcare systems” (by J. Moreira, L. Ferreira Pires, M. van Sinderen and L. M. Daniele). It is the very first time that an application paper wins this award.

Two other keynotes were given by Peter Simons, which addressed the notion of representation and the aboutness relation, and by Riichiro Mizoguchi, which presented a new ontological theory of causation.
Finally, the Early Career Symposium allowed the students to discuss their PhD’s plans and goals with the FOIS participants with the advantage of collecting and comparing a variety of views as arising in the different disciplines present at FOIS.

The keynote presentations are accessible (for a limited time) from the FOIS 2018 website.

and the FOIS 2018 proceedings in the IOS Press online access page in the member’s area.

Please also see the reports on FOIS 2018 and on ISAO 2018 (with pictures!) from the Local Chair Maria Keet:
FOIS’18 conference report
ISAO 2018, Cape Town, ‘trip’ report

The Program Chairs, Stefano Borgo and Pascal Hitzler.

NOVEMBER 2018 NEWSLETTER

Dear IAOA members,

herewith you receive the November newsletter on events that cover research in ontology (conferences, workshops, etc.) or are associated with IAOA (e.g., meetings of Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and Committees). These newsletters shall inform you about upcoming events and their corresponding deadlines. They may also include short reports of interesting past events, for example, by IAOA members who attended them. The planned frequency of the newsletters ranges from monthly to bi-monthly. This service complements the calendars of events [1] and deadlines [2], which we run for gathering event information. Please notice that such calendars are now easily accessible from the right sidebar of the landing page of the IAOA website [3] and from the Events page [4].

Should you have any further suggestions, comments or questions on this service, please let us know by writing to the Association [5] or publicly to the membership [6].

Should you be aware of events that you wish to be added to the calendar, you may write to [7].

Sincerely,
IAOA Executive Council

[1] calendar: “IAOA Check Events”
https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=iaoa.member%40googlemail.com

[2] calendar: “IAOA Check Deadlines”
https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=os3b7er3ad4ela965ggjoa7u80%40group.calendar.google.com

[3] https://iaoa.org/

[4] https://iaoa.org/index.php/events/

[5] info@iaoa.org

[6] iaoa-member@ovgu.de

[7] calendars@iaoa.org

==================================
UPCOMING EVENTS INVOLVING ONTOLOGY
==================================

* EKAW 2018 – 21st International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management
November 12-16, Nancy, France

Website: https://project.inria.fr/ekaw2018/

* AI*IA 2018 – 17th International Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence
November 20-23, Trento, Italy

Website: http://aixia2018.fbk.eu

* TriCoLore 2018 – C3GI – ISD – SCORE – Creativity | Cognition | Computation
December 13-14, Bolzano, Italy

Website: https://tricolore.inf.unibz.it

* IEEE ICSC 2019 – 13th IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing
January 30 – February 1, Newport Beach, California, USA

Website: http://www.ieee-icsc.org

==========================================================
APPROACHING DEADLINES OF FURTHER EVENTS INVOLVING ONTOLOGY
==========================================================

* CAiSE 2019 – 31st International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering
June 3-7, 2019, Roma, Italy

Deadline for submissions:
*** Friday, November 23 (abstract submission)
*** Friday, November 30 (paper submission)

Website: https://www.caise19.it/

* ESWC 2019 – 16th Extended Semantic Web Conference
June 2-6, 2019, Portoroz, Slovenia

Deadline for submissions:
*** Monday, December 3 (abstract submission)
*** Monday, December 10 (paper submission)

Website: https://2019.eswc-conferences.org

* LDK 2019 – 2nd Conference on Language, Data and Knowledge
May 20-22, 2019, Leipzig, Germany

Deadline for submissions:
*** Friday, January 11 (paper submission)

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UPCOMING MEETINGS OF IAOA SIGS AND COMMITTEES
=============================================

* Ontology Summit 2019
November 14, virtual meeting
(the Ontology Summit is organized and run by the Ontolog Community)
John Sowa “Explanations and help facilities designed for people”

Websites:
*** http://ontologforum.org/index.php/OntologySummit2019
*** http://ontologforum.org/index.php/WikiHomePage
*** Call for Presentations and Schedule: http://bit.ly/2zzyX6s

* Executive Council (EC) Meeting

next meeting: n.206, November 26, 14:30 UTC
default dates: bi-weekly, on Mondays, 14:30 UTC

EC Webpage:

Executive Council

* EduTC Meetings – Technical Committee on Education

next meeting: n. 33, December 5, 14:30 UTC
default dates: 1st Wednesday of each month, 15:00 UTC

Mailing list archive:
https://listserv.ovgu.de/pipermail/iaoa-education/

EduTC Webpage:
https://iaoa.org/index.php/about/organization/standing- committees/education-standing-committee/

EduTC Wiki: http://iaoaedu.cs.uct.ac.za/

* SWAO SIG Meetings – Semantic Web Applied Ontology SIG

next meeting: n.61, December 3, 18:30 UTC
default dates: 1st Monday of each month, 18:30 UTC

Mailing list archive: https://listserv.ovgu.de/pipermail/iaoa-swao/

Last SWAO Meeting Webpage:
http://ontologforum.org/index.php/IAOA_SWAO_SIG-confcall_n_60

< end of newsletter >