1st Virtual Assembly during April 14-21 for 2013 Financial Statement and 2014 Budget Approval

[copy of today’s address to the membership by the IAOA President Michael Gruninger]
Dear IAOA members,our Statute requires the Association’s financial statement and annual budget to be formally approved every year by a (virtual) assembly, announced at least 15 days in advance. So this is a formal invitation to participate in the first 2014 virtual assembly, whose main purpose is to discuss and approve

our Statute requires the Association’s financial statement and annual budget to be formally approved every year by a (virtual) assembly, announced at least 15 days in advance. So this is a formal invitation to participate in the first 2014 virtual assembly, whose main purpose is to discuss and approve the 2013 Financial Statement and the 2014 Budget. Our financial status is safe, not only anticipating this year’s FOIS conference and Summer School. Overall, we are actively supporting participation in a wide variety of novel as well as traditional IAOA initiatives.

The relevant documents (Financial Statement plus Budget) will be published on April 02, 2014.

The discussion on the Budget (and possibly on any other issue concerning the Association) will take place between April 02 and April 09, 2014.

Finalized details will be published by April 11, 2014.

The voting period will be April 14-21, 2014. Detailed voting instructions will be distributed in advance and will be available at [1].

The quorum is satisfied if the number of votes exceeds 50%+1 of the IAOA membership count, determined on April 13. If we are not able to meet the quorum requirement, a second call will be necessary. The outcome of the voting will be announced to the members’ mailing list until April 30, 2014.

Please be aware that your vote takes just a few minutes, but is of huge importance to let our Association move forward. Guaranteeing that the IAOA is truly open and democratic is our first priority, and you will certainly understand that it requires a huge investment of voluntary time. We really count on your support!

Let me take this opportunity to express the gratitude of the whole IAOA Executive Council to our acting Treasurer, Laure Vieu. She did an excellent job in keeping our finances under rigorous control as in previous years, making at the same time everything transparent and understandable in any detail. Serving as Treasurer since IAOA’s inception, Laure is currently passing on the respective duties to our new designated Treasurer Fabian Neuhaus, under whose direction the 2014 budget has already been prepared, and to the new Membership Officer Claudio Masolo. We are grateful for their readiness and contributions.

Get together in sunny Rio de Janeiro for the premier IAOA event, FOIS 2014

In September 2014, the international community of ontologists will flock to the Brazilian coastline for the largest IAOA event of the year, the flagship Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS) conference.

Research paper submissions are due on March 3 — start preparing now, as just as in previous FOIS events, we expect tough competition! This year, in addition to paper submissions there will also be an ontology competition in which a prize will be awarded to the winning ontology evaluated by the criteria outlined in last year’s Ontology Summit.

Find out more about this event at http://fois2014.inf.ufes.br/p/home.html.

Janna Hastings

Here comes the Ontology Summit 2014!

We are so far.
The Ontology Summit 2014 has just started this week.
For the first time ever in the Ontology Summit history, more than 100 members and interested parties from around the world have attended the Launch Event on January 16 via phone and chat!
A achievement for our Community!
Colleagues are already posting about the event, so don’t miss out!
Become a member and join the Summit and the Community discussion! You can only win!
And help us spread the word (G+, Twitter, FB) (official twitter account: @OntologySummit; proposed hashtag: #ontosum)
— Francesca Quattri

The 7th International Workshop on Modular Ontologies (WoMO-13) – report

The 7th International Workshop on Modular Ontologies (WoMO-13) took place in Corua (Galicia, Spain) co-located with the 12th International Conference on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning (LPNMR-13). LPNMR-13 has been a good host: they took care of the local organisation of rooms, coffee breaks, registration, and they also handled the finances of the co-located workshops. WoMO-13 registrants have also been invited to the LPNMR-13 reception held at the Universidade da Corua, in the main hall overlooking the ocean. The view could have not been more stunning thanks to the sunny weather that delighted the attendants the whole day.

WoMO-13 has five accepted papers. The CEUR proceedings (http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1081/) include two additional contributions: one by Prof. Till Mossakowski (University of Magdeburg), whose invited talk was supported by IAOA; and one by Prof. George Vourous (University of Piraeus), whose invited talk was co-organised with the co-located workshop CLIMA XIV – Computational Logic in Multi-Agent Systems, and funded by SINTELNET.

The WoMO-13 Programme consisted of 2 invited talks, 4 long papers, and 1 short paper. To offer the attendants a richer schedule and to widen the audience, the Organising Committee decided to join the effort with ARCOE-13, a workshop associated with LPNMR-13 on a topic related to WoMO-13, that had 3 accepted papers and one invited speaker.

The workshop programme is detailed in what follows:

10:00-11:00: WoMO invited talk:
– Till Mossakowski: The Distributed Ontology, Modeling and Specification Language
11:00-11:25: WoMO session I
– Soudabeh Ghafourian, Mahmoud Naghibzadeh and Amin Rezaeian: Modularization of Graph-Structured Ontology with Semantic Similarity
11:25-12:00: Coffee break
12:00-13:30: WoMO session II
– Ralph Schfermeier and Adrian Paschke: Towards a Unified Approach to Modular Ontology Development Using the Aspect-Oriented Paradigm
– Patrick Koopmann and Renate A. Schmidt: Implementation and Evaluation of Forgetting in ALC-Ontologies
– William Gatens, Boris Konev and Frank Wolter: Module Extraction for Acyclic Ontologies
– Francisco Martin-Recuerda and Dirk Walther: Fast atomic decomposition using axiom dependency hypergraphs
13:30-15:00: Lunch break
15:00-16:35: ARCOE session I
16:35-17:00: Coffee break
17:00-17:25: ARCOE session II
17:25-18:30: WoMO+CLIMA invited talk

– George Vouros: Combining ontologies in settings with multiple agents

The OC has received enthusiastic feedback from the audience for the generous support of IAOA.
Chiara Del Vescovo

SIG for Semantic Web Applied Ontology? Let us know what you think!

There is an informal proposal before the EC to form a Semantic Web Applied Ontology SIG aiming to fill the gap between the Semantic Web community and the IAOA community. Some people have shown interest in this initiative. As part of investigating this issue, wed like to get feedback from IAOA members.

 

Often the two communities seem to think they have nothing in common, whereas some of us believe they share many common goals, common technologies, and a common interest in well-engineered applied ontologies. Many of us in IAOA promote and use Semantic Web technologies and reasoning methods; similarly, many in the Semantic Web community advocate more rigorous and principled ontologies based on ontological analysis. Therefore, we have proposed a Semantic Web Applied Ontology SIG to bridge the gap between our two communities before it gets wider. This SIG would support communication and collaboration with our colleagues in the Semantic Web (and Linked Data) community.

 

Are you interested in this SIG? What do you think the SIG should do? How might the SIG work to bridge the gap? Would you participate in this SIG?

 

Please let us know your thoughts about such a SIG.

 

Thanks,

Leo

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