October 2025 newsletter
Dear IAOA members,
Below, you will find the news and announcements of our October 2025 newsletter.
If you have information to share with the IAOA’s community, e.g., scientific events you wish to advertise, please do not hesitate to contact us (calendars@iaoa.org).
Best,
The Executive Council of the IAOA
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UPCOMING EVENTS INVOLVING ONTOLOGY
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* 24th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2025)
2-6 November 2025, Nara, Japan
Website: https://iswc2025.semanticweb.org/
* 16th International Conference on Biological and Biomedical Ontology (ICBO 2025)
November 3-9, 2025
Website: https://icbo-conference.github.io/icbo2025/
* 37th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI 2025)
3-5 November 2025 – Athens, Greece
Website: https://ictai.computer.org/2025/
* Seventh Knowledge Graph and Semantic Web Conference (KGSWC 2025)
November 26-28, HTWK, Leipzig, Germany
Website: https://kgsw.org
* 18th IFIP WG8.1 Working Conference on the Practice of Enterprise Modeling (PoEM 2025)
December 3–5, 2025 – Geneva, Switzerland
Website: https://poem2025.unige.ch/
* 13th International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP 2025),
December 10-12, 2025 – Dayton, Ohio, USA
Website: https://www.k-cap.org/2025/
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UPCOMING DEADLINES OF EVENTS INVOLVING ONTOLOGY
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* WorldCIST’26 – 14th World Conference on Information Systems and Technologies,
Madeira Island, Portugal (and Online) (WorldCIST-2026)
Website: https://worldcist.org/
Important dates:
**Paper Submission: November 24, 2025
**Notification of Acceptance: December 31, 2025
**Payment of Registration, to ensure the inclusion of an accepted paper
**in the conference proceedings: January 7, 2026.
**Camera-ready Submission: January 7, 2026
* 23rd International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning
July 20-23, 2026 – Lisbon, Portugal
Important dates:
** February 8, 2026 (Submission of title and abstract)
** February 13, 2026 (Paper submission deadline)
** March 24-28, 2026 (Author response period)
** April 13, 2026 (Notification of acceptance)
** May 3, 2026 (Camera-ready due)
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SCOR Online Seminar — October 30, 15:00 UTC
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The Third SCOR Online Seminar — Tarcisio Mendes de Farias on ontologies and LLMs, October 30, 15:00 UTC
The SCOR Online Seminar is an activity of the Swiss Center for Ontological Research (SCOR) [1].
It is a one-hour public online seminar (including a brief Q&A session) by an ontology researcher/practitioner in Switzerland (and beyond).
Date and Time
Thursday, October 30, 2025
15:00 UTC / 16:00 CET / 11:00 EDT
Organizer
Fumiaki Toyoshima (University of Neuchâtel)
Location
Online (via Webex): https://unine.webex.com/unine/j.php?MTID=m88edf40cd379b0b880ddcfa3f5bb7316
Program
Tarcisio Mendes de Farias (SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics)
“Knowledge Representation and Ontologies in the Era of Large Language Models”
Abstract
With the advent of large language models (LLMs), we are currently able to build applications with a relatively good accuracy that can process and generate “human”-like text, engage in natural language conversations, and perform several types of tasks based on users’ prompts. Nevertheless, it is well known that LLMs and their applications can have several limitations among them: hallucinations, indecisiveness, a “black-box” approach and lacking domain-specific knowledge. To address these limitations and more, the knowledge representation with ontologies can play a key role by making it possible to use and enhance LLMs for challenging applications that demand a high accuracy and verifiable outcomes. One of these applications is scientific question answering. In this talk, I will present different strategies to address the LLM limitations such as fine- and prompt-tuning, discuss effective relations between ontologies and LLMs, and our latest work on building a question answering system over scientific data in the form of knowledge graphs. In this recent work, we also seek to leverage the ontologies used to build these knowledge graphs.
Short bio
Dr. Tarcisio Mendes de Farias is a team leader and a computer scientist by training at the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. He co-leads the Knowledge Representation Unit [2] at SIB. Currently, he is a PI in several national and international research and infrastructure projects involving the R&D of advanced methodologies for ontology engineering, data management, semantic data interoperability and integration, and question answering systems based on large language models.
Contact
For any inquiries, please kindly reference “Third SCOR Online Seminar” in your message via the SCOR contact form [3].
Links
[1] https://swissonto.ch/
[2] https://www.sib.swiss/community/our-groups/vital-it/knowledge-representation-unit
[3] https://swissonto.ch/contact-us/
Upcoming SCOR-related events
December 11, 2025 (tentatively scheduled): A SCOR online seminar on mereology by a researcher based outside Switzerland (subject to change).
February 5 and 6, 2026: The First Swiss Conference on Applied Ontology (SCAO 2026). https://swissonto.ch/scao2026/
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
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[1] calendar: “IAOA Check Events” https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0/embed?src=iaoa.member@googlemail.com
[2] calendar: “IAOA Check Deadlines” https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0/embed?src=os3b7er3ad4ela965ggjoa7u80@group.calendar.google.com
[3] https://iaoa.org
[4] https://iaoa.org/index.php/calendar/events/
[5] info@iaoa.org