Category: Annual Newsletter

Happy New Year 2019 to all IAOA members!

This past year was quite an active one for our Association.

The Tenth International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2018) was held in Cape Town, South Africa, on September 17-21, 2018. Oliver Kutz (General Chair) together with Stefano Borgo and Pascal Hitzler (Programme Chairs), as well as Maria Keet (Local Chair), crafted an amazing conference that showcased the latest research in applied ontology.
The Best Paper Award went to
Joao Moreira, Luis Ferreira Pires, Marten van Sinderen and Laura M. Daniele. SAREF4health: IoT standard-based ontology-driven healthcare systems
The two Distinguished Paper Awards went to
Claudio Masolo and Laure Vieu. Graph-Based Approaches to Structural Universals and Complex States of Affairs
and
Michael Gruninger, Bahar Aameri, Carmen Chui, Torsten Hahmann and Yi Ru. Foundational Ontologies for Units of Measure

The Fourth Interdisciplinary School on Applied Ontology (ISAO) was co-located with FOIS between September 10-15, 2018 (the Monday to Saturday in the week before FOIS). Aldo Gangemi (General Chair) and Antony Galton (Programme Chair) as well as Maria Keet (Local Chair) worked together to organize an educational event of high quality.
Peter Simons, Arina Britz, and Stefan Schulz were among the instructors who facilitated a full immersion experience in ontology (full programme here).

As in previous years, IAOA was again a co-organizer of the Ontology Summit. For 2018 the theme “Context in Context” was selected, covering such topics as Upper Ontologies for Specifying Context, Contexts in the Open Knowledge Network, and Contexts for Integration and Interoperability.

This year, the Ontology Summit 2019 explores the role of ontologies for explaining the reasoning of a system. More specifically, the summit is focused on critical explanation gaps and the role of ontologies for dealing with these gaps. The sessions will examine current technologies and real needs driven by risks and requirements to meet legal or other standards.

One of the premier events for 2019 will be JOWO 2019 (Joint Ontology Workshops) which will take place at the University of Graz, September 23-25, 2019. In addition to workshops, JOWO will host tutorials, joint panel sessions and keynotes, as well as meetings of IAOA Special Interest Groups and Technical Committees.
Interest has been expressed to organize the following workshops:

• BOG (Bad Ontology) – CAOS (Cognition and Ontologies)
• CREOL (Contextual Representation of Objects and Events in Language)
• DAO-SI (Data meets Applied Ontology in Open Science and Innovation)
• FOMI (Formal Ontologies meet Industry)
• FOUST (Workshop on Foundational Ontology)
• ODLS (Ontology and Data in Life Sciences)
• SHAPES (The Shape of Things)
• SoLEE (Ontology of Social, Legal and Economic Entities)
• WODHSS (Workshop on Ontologies for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences)
• WOMoCoE (Workshop on Ontology Modularity, Contextuality, and Evolution)
• WINKS (Workshop on Interaction-Based Knowledge Sharing)

The other big event this year will be the Summer Institute with the theme Places and Things which will consider the commonalities between ontologies for geographical and physical objects, such as location and dimensionality. Stay tuned for details on the dates for the Summer Institute.

Elections brought some changes on the IAOA Executive Council last December, with Zena Wood retiring and Maria Keet joining the EC. Additionally, Laure Vieu is now President of IAOA. Many thanks for Zena for her invaluable work on the EC, and thanks to Michael for his years of outstanding service as President.
The new EC has already planned for a new internal organization in 2019, with more committees in charge of preparing decisions ahead, and the aim to further involve the membership in its activities. Stay tuned!

With a full agenda for 2019, we look forward to your continuing support in all the endeavours of IAOA and will hope to see you at any or all of this year’s events!

Laure Vieu and Oliver Kutz
for the IAOA Executive Council

Welcome to the IAOA website, relaunched in early September 2018. Besides our hope that the relaunch is beneficial for all users of the site, another major good news for everyone interested in being or becoming a member of IAOA is that we are gradually reopening membership renewal during September and October … eventually! More details on the reopening can be found at the page Join IAOA.

The relaunch is further a good opportunity to highlight the major 2018 events organized by IAOA as well as to reflect on IAOA’s activities in the previous year. Indeed, IAOA’s two major 2018 events are most topical during September 2018.

The Tenth International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems, FOIS 2018, will be held in Cape Town, South Africa, on September 17-21, 2018. Oliver Kutz (General Chair) together with Stefano Borgo and Pascal Hitzler (Programme Chairs), as well as Maria Keet (Local Chair), are crafting an amazing conference that will showcase the latest research in applied ontology. In addition to the main track, FOIS hosts five workshops and two tutorials as the Joint Ontology Workshops, JOWO 2018, as well as an Early Career Symposium. It further includes an Assembly of the membership, accessible locally and virtually and open to everyone interested. For up-to-date information, please visit the FOIS 2018 website.

Moreover, the Fourth Interdisciplinary School on Applied Ontology, ISAO 2018, will be co-located with FOIS in Cape Town and precedes the conference between September 10-15, 2018. Aldo Gangemi (General Chair) and Antony Galton (Programme Chair) as well as Maria Keet (Local Chair) have worked together to organize an educational event of high quality. Peter Simons, Stefano Borgo, and Stefan Schulz are among the instructors who will facilitate a full immersion experience in ontology, as one can see from the programme of the school.

Between January and April 2018 IAOA was again a co-organizer of the Ontology Summit, as in previous years. For 2018 the theme “Contexts in Context” was selected, covering such topics as Upper Ontologies for Specifying Context, Contexts in the Open Knowledge Network, and Contexts for Integration and Interoperability. The 2018 Ontology Summit Communique has recently been published in Applied Ontology.

Likewise and thereby turning to the beginning of 2017, IAOA was one of the co-organizers of the Ontology Summit 2017, which addressed the theme “AI, Learning, Reasoning, and Ontologies”. It explored the various connections between these areas, with conclusions presented in the 2017 Communique.

The Fourth IAOA Summer Institute was held during August 8-11, 2017 at the University of Toronto, Canada. The topic of the Summer Institute was “Upper Ontologies”, with Stefano Borgo, Michael Gruninger, Nicola Guarino, and Barry Smith as facilitators. Over thirty-two participants brainstormed and debated issues arising from the conceptual underpinnings and application of upper ontologies.

The Joint Ontology Workshops (Episode III: The Tyrolean Autumn), JOWO 2017, took place at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy between September 21-23, 2017. An impressive number of ten co-located workshops explored a diverse range of topics related to applied ontology in varied ways:

• CREOL: Contextual Representation of Objects and Events in Language
• DAO: Data meets Applied Ontologies
• DEW: Ontology Debugging & Evaluation
• EPINON: Epistemology in Ontologies
• FOMI: Formal Ontologies Meet Industry
• FOUST II: 2nd Workshop on Foundational Ontology
• ISD3: The 3rd Image Schema Day
• ODLS: 8th Workshop on Ontologies and Data in Life Sciences
• SHAPES 4.0: The Shape of Things
• WINKS: Workshop on Interaction-Based Knowledge Sharing

The post-proceedings of JOWO 2017 include 69 contributions and were published in January 2018 as volume 2050 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings. Special thanks to the JOWO 2017 chairs — Stefano Borgo, Oliver Kutz, Frank Loebe, and Fabian Neuhaus — for planning and executing amazing and memorable three days!

All efforts are made to allow for a similar success of our flagship events in September 2018. Moreover, there is an active agenda for the remainder of the year in administrative terms, among other items including the further settling of IAOA in its still new location Switzerland, rounding off website refurbishment and not at least running another, virtual Assembly for electing members for the Executive Council in November.

We look forward to the continuing support of our longstanding as well as novel members in all endeavours of IAOA. Moreover, we invite everyone interested to participate in ISAO, FOIS or any future events of the Association – it would be a great pleasure to meet you there!

Michael Gruninger and Oliver Kutz
for the IAOA Executive Council

Dear IAOA members,

2015 comprised a special milestone for our community as we marked the10th anniversary of the Applied Ontology journal [1]. Nicola Guarino,Mark Musen, and the rest of the Editorial Board worked hard on a specialissue, which will be published in the coming months.

IAOA was one of the co-organizers for Ontology Summit 2015 [2], whichaddressed the theme “The Internet of Things: Toward Smart NetworkedSystems and Societies.” and explored Ontology Integration in IoT,Semantic Sensor Network Ontologies, Decision Making in DifferentDomains, and Related Standards and Synergies for Emerging IoT Ontologies.

The Third IAOA Summer Institute (in cooperation with the VespucciInstitutes 2015) [3] was held during the week of June 22-26 at Collegeof the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, USA. The topic this year was”Spatial Ontologies for e-Science” with Werner Kuhn, Peter Fox, andMichael Gruninger as facilitators. Amidst the scenery of coastal Maine,participants engaged in a wide range of discussions, primarilyconsidering the notion of location. Topics included the role of locationin schema.org [4] and PROV-O [5], geoscience without geometry, and astudy of the concept of along (e.g. as in samples were taken alongthe river). Michael Gruninger was bestowed the honour of Fellow of the
Vespucci Initiative for the Advancement of Geographic Information inScience [6]. Special thanks are extended to Werner Kuhn, whoseindomitable energy, inspiration, and organizational prowess made theSummer Institute another success.

Last year marked the first edition of JOWO (Joint Ontology Workshops)[7] at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence(IJCAI) [8] in Buenos Aires, Argentina on July 25-31. This eventco-located the Workshop on Modular Ontologies (WoMO), Formal Ontologiesfor Artificial Intelligence (FOfAI), the Workshop on Ontologies andLogic Programming for Query Answering, and the Workshop on Belief Changeand Non Monotonic Reasoning in Ontologies and Databases.

The 7th Workshop on Formal Ontologies Meet Industry (FOMI) [9] wasco-located with the RuleML Conference [10] in Berlin on August 5.Organized by Roberta Cuel and Bob Young, the workshop brought togetheran interesting mix of perspectives from a wide range of industrialapplications.

Concerning internal affairs, the end of the year brought changes to theExecutive Council (EC). Marion Haemmerli, Janna Hastings, and Leo Obrstall retired from the EC. Leo has served as an EC member from thecreation of IAOA in 2009, and Marion has been instrumental in laying thegroundwork for the relocation of IAOA from Italy to Switzerland. Aheartfelt thanks to Janna, Marion, and Leo for all of their hard work!Ken Baclawski, Amanda Vizedom, and Zena Wood were elected to theExecutive Council, with their term starting this January, 2016.

Under the leadership of Maria Keet and Zena Wood, the IAOA EducationCommittee has been re-energized, with the visible result of getting awiki [11] started, where people can find information on ontologycourses, material, and textbooks. See there [12] to find out how tocontribute to this effort.

This coming year will be quite exciting, with IAOA supporting severalmajor events. The Ninth International Conference on Formal Ontology inInformation Systems (FOIS 2016) [13] will be held in Annecy, France, onJuly 6-9. Giancarlo Guizzardi (General Chair) together with RobertaFerrario and Werner Kuhn (Programme Chairs), as well as PatrickBarlatier and Richard Dapoigny (Local Chairs), are crafting an amazingconference that will showcase the latest research in applied ontology.For up-to-date information, visit the website at
[13] https://www.iaoa.org/fois2016 .

The Education Committee is leading the planning for the ThirdInterdisciplinary School on Applied Ontology (ISAO) [14], which willtake place in Bolzano, Italy, between June 27 and July 1, 2016, i.e.Monday to Friday in the week before FOIS. Keep your eyes open for publicannouncements in the near future.

As in previous years, IAOA will again be a co-organizer of the OntologySummit [15]. Ontology Summit 2016 has selected as theme for this year”Semantic Integration”. The Summit will offer a particularly importantopportunity for identifying use cases for applying formal ontologies tosemantic integration problems in the domains of earth sciences, biologyand medicine, cloud computing, engineering, and finance.

The relocation of IAOA from Italy to Switzerland is still on our agenda.Unfortunately, this project could not be finished in 2015 as intendedoriginally, primarily due to delays in the revision of the Statute andthe Bylaws for Switzerland. However, we are now approaching thecompletion of this revision as well as the formal foundation of IAOA inSwitzerland, which are planned until March 2016. Please note that thistiming has a side effect on membership renewals for 2016. All activememberships of 2015 are “silently” extended until March 31, 2016. Afterthe foundation of IAOA in Switzerland and the setup of a new bankaccount all members will be informed when we are ready to enroll forthis year.

With an active agenda for 2016, we look forward to your continuingsupport in all the endeavours of IAOA and will hope to see you at any orall of this year’s events!

Michael Gruninger and Oliver Kutz
for the IAOA Executive Council

[1] http://www.iospress.nl/journal/applied-ontology/
[2] http://ontolog.cim3.net/OntologySummit/2015/
[3] http://www.vespucci.org/presentation
[4] https://schema.org/
[5] http://www.w3.org/TR/prov-o/
[6] http://www.vespucci.org/
[7] https://www.iaoa.org/jowo/
[8] http://ijcai-15.org/
[9] http://www.csw.inf.fu-berlin.de/fomi2015/
[10] http://2015.ruleml.org/
[11] http://iaoaedu.cs.uct.ac.za
[12] http://iaoaedu.cs.uct.ac.za/pmwiki.php?n=IAOAEdu.HowToJoin
[13] https://www.iaoa.org/fois2016
[14] http://isao2016.inf.unibz.it/
[15] http://ontologforum.org/index.php/OntologySummit

Frank Loebe