Category: Conferences & Workshops

The Joint Ontology Workshops – JOWO 2020
Episode 6: The Bolzano Summer of Knowledge /
Workshop Days of EKAW – ICBO – FOIS

http://bosk2020.inf.unibz.it
https://www.iaoa.org/jowo/2020

Call for Workshop and Tutorial Proposals

* Submission deadline: February 15, 2020 *
* Notification: March 1, 2020 *

The Joint Workshop Committees of BOSK 2020 invite proposals for workshops and tutorials for EKAW, ICBO and FOIS as part of the Bolzano Summer of Knowledge, held during the week of September 14-20, 2020.

Workshops and tutorials at JOWO 2020 are events whose scientific program is independently established by the workshop organizers. They will be responsible for advertising the workshop and reviewing and selecting the contributions. Workshops can be events that provide a forum for the discussion of topics broadly related to ontologies, formal ontology, and knowledge management and their application in information science or other areas. Together, the JOWO workshops can address a wide spectrum of topics related to ontology research, ranging from Cognitive Science to Knowledge Representation, Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, Logic, Philosophy, and Linguistics. JOWO is especially suitable for interdisciplinary and innovative formats.

Previous JOWO editions were held as independent events in 2019 in Graz (Austria), in 2017 in Bolzano (Italy), and in conjunction with FOIS 2018 in Cape Town (South Africa), with FOIS 2016 in Annecy (France), and at IJCAI 2015 in Buenos Aires (Argentina).

As in earlier years, all contributions to JOWO workshops will be published open access in a joint CEUR proceedings volume, as part of the new IAOA series (http://ceur-ws.org/iaoa.html).

We welcome proposals from researchers and practitioners interested in the theory, practice, development and/or application of ontologies and related areas are invited to submit workshop proposals for review.

We encourage several forms and length of workshops (the list is non-exhaustive):
– workshops that focus on an established research area, including continuations of workshops that were held in the past;
– workshops that focus on emerging topics and applications, or on open research questions and challenges;
– workshops that aim to create cross-disciplinary research fostering exchange of ideas between groups otherwise mostly disconnected.

SUBMISSION

Proposals for workshops and tutorials should be no more than 2 pages in length, and must contain the following information:
– title of the workshop/tutorial;
– select one primary conference affiliation: EKAW, FOIS, or ICBO (for reviewing and scheduling purposes; a brief description of each conference can be found below);
– names of the workshop/tutorial organizers;
– brief description of experience in workshop/tutorial organization;
– description of the workshop/tutorial topic;
– brief description of the expected audience (please give an estimate of the expected number of participants and their background and interests, if applicable please relate this to participation in similar prior events);
– intended duration of the workshop (between half a day and a full day);
– timeline for the workshop (submission dates, notification dates), taking into account the proposed “important dates” below.

Workshop proposals should be sent tojowo.steering@gmail.com by February 15, 2020.

EVALUATION

Submissions of workshop proposals will be evaluated by the workshop chairs of JOWO 2020 using the following criteria:
– Scientific relevance and utility to attendees;
– Quality of the proposal;
– Likelihood of success of the workshop;
– Overlap and complementarity with other workshops.

IMPORTANT DATES

– February 15, 2020 – Workshop proposal submission deadline
– March 1, 2020 – Workshop acceptance notification
– March 16, 2020 – 1st call for papers to be distributed by workshop organizers
– September 14-20, 2020 – Workshops in Bolzano in conjunction with EKAW, FOIS and ICBO

FURTHER INQUIRIES

In case of further questions please contactjowo.steering@gmail.com

DESCRIPTION AND SCOPE OF EKAW, ICBO, AND FOIS

The International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW) is concerned with all aspects of eliciting, acquiring, modelling and managing knowledge, as well its role in the construction of knowledge-intensive systems and services for the semantic web, knowledge management, e-business, natural language processing, intelligent information integration, etc. The focus of EKAW 2020 will be “Ethical and Trustworthy Knowledge Engineering”. EKAW workshops should provide an informal setting where participants have the opportunity to discuss specific technical topics in an atmosphere that fosters the active exchange of ideas. EKAW tutorials should enable attendees to appreciate, evaluate, or utilize relevant trends, methods, tools, models, etc.

The International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies (ICBO) is a premier annual conference series that brings together researchers, students and professionals involved in the development and application of ontologies in all areas of biology, medicine, diseases, human health, genome biology, environment, biomes, nutrition, food, plants, agriculture and others. ICBO workshops provide the opportunity to discuss and progress a variety of issues at the forefront of biomedical ontologies and to build communities around specific topic areas. ICBO tutorials should provide a rich forum for education, training and dissemination to advance the next generation of biomedical ontologists and share knowledge about infrastructure, standards and platforms for advanced tooling.

The International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information System (FOIS) is a biennial conference, which is dedicated to interdisciplinary research at the intersection of philosophical ontology, linguistics, logic, cognitive science, and computer science, as well as in the applications of ontological analysis to specific domains. FOIS is the flagship conference of the International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA). Given its scope and since FOIS is a single track conference, presentations at FOIS typically cover a broad range of subjects. FOIS workshops complement the main conference by providing a venue for presentations and discussions on a particular subject area. FOIS tutorials should provide an introduction to methods, theories, standards, infrastructure or tools that are of interest to FOIS participants.

EKAW 2020 CALL FOR PAPERS https://ekaw2020.inf.unibz.it/
Part of the Bolzano Summer of Knowledge 2020. https://summerofknowledge.inf.unibz.it

Research, in-use and position papers

The 22nd International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management concerns all aspects of eliciting, acquiring, modeling and managing knowledge, and the role of knowledge in the construction of systems and services for the semantic web, knowledge management, e-business, natural language processing, intelligent information integration, and so on.

The special theme of EKAW 2020 is “Ethical and Trustworthy Knowledge Engineering”. While recent reported breaches relate predominantly to machine learning systems, it is not impossible to envision ethical breaches in knowledge engineering more broadly and, conversely, devise methods and techniques to ensure no or minimal harm in knowledge acquisition, modelling, and knowledge-driven information systems. EKAW 2020 will put a special emphasis on the importance of Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management to keep fostering trustworthy systems.

Proceedings

The proceedings of the research track will be published by Springer Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series.

Topics of interest

EKAW 2020 welcomes papers dealing with theoretical, methodological, experimental, and application-oriented aspects of knowledge engineering and knowledge management.

In particular, but not exclusively, we solicit papers about methods, tools and methodologies on the following topics:

• Ethical and Trustworthy Knowledge Engineering
  
  • Ethics and trust in automated reasoning
  • Algorithmic transparency and explanations for knowledge-based systems
  • Knowledge and ethics
  • Ontologies for trust and ethics
  • Trust and privacy in knowledge representation
• Knowledge Engineering and Acquisition
  
  • Tools and methodologies for ontology engineering
  • Ontology design patterns
  • Ontology localisation
  • Multilinguality in ontologies
  • Ontology alignment
  • Knowledge authoring and semantic annotation
  • Knowledge acquisition from non-ontological resources (thesauri, folksonomies, etc.)
  • Semi-automatic knowledge acquisition, e.g., ontology learning
  • Collaborative knowledge acquisition and formalisation
  • Mining the Semantic Web and the Web of Data
  • Ontology evaluation and metrics
  • Uncertainty and vagueness in knowledge representation
  • Dealing with dynamic, distributed and emerging knowledge
• Knowledge Management
  
  • Methodologies and tools for knowledge management
  • Knowledge sharing and distribution, collaboration
  • Best practices and lessons learned from case studies
  • Provenance and trust in knowledge management
  • FAIR data and knowledge
  • Methods for accelerating take-up of knowledge management technologies
  • Corporate memories for knowledge management
  • Knowledge evolution, maintenance and preservation
  • Incentives for human knowledge acquisition and data quality improvement (e.g. games with a purpose)
• Social and Cognitive Aspects of Knowledge Representation
  
  • Similarity and analogy-based reasoning
  • Knowledge representation inspired by cognitive science
  • Synergies between humans and machines
  • Knowledge emerging from user interaction and networks
  • Knowledge ecosystems
  • Expert finding, e.g., by social network analysis
  • Collaborative and social approaches to knowledge management and acquisition
  • Crowdsourcing in knowledge management
• Knowledge discovery
  
  • Mining patterns and association rules
  • Mining complex data: numbers, sequences, trees, graphs
  • Formal Concept Analysis and extensions
  • Numerical data mining methods and knowledge processing
  • Mining the web of data for knowledge construction
  • Text mining and ontology engineering
  • Classification and clustering for knowledge management
  • Symbolic and sub-symbolic learning machine learningÂ
• Applications in specific domains such as
  
  • eGovernment and public administration
  • Life sciences, health and medicine
  • Humanities and Social Sciences
  • Automotive and manufacturing industry
  • Cultural heritage
  • Digital libraries
  • Geosciences
  • ICT4D (Knowledge in the developing world)

Type of papers

We will accept different types of papers. The papers will all have the same status and follow the same formatting guidelines in the proceedings but will receive special treatment during the reviewing phase. In particular, each paper type will be subject to its own evaluation criteria. The Programme Committee will also make sure that there is a reasonable balance of the paper types accepted. At submission time the paper has to be clearly identified as belonging to one of the following categories.

• Research papers: These are “standard” papers presenting a novel method, technique or analysis with appropriate empirical or other types of evaluation as a proof-of-concept. The main evaluation criteria here will be originality, technical soundness and validation.
• In-use papers: Here we are expecting papers describing applications of knowledge management and engineering in real environments. Applications need to address a sufficiently interesting and challenging problem on real-world datasets, involving many users, etc. The focus is less on the originality of the approach and more on presenting systems that solve a significant problem while addressing the particular challenges that come with the use of real-world data. Evaluations are essential for this type of paper and should involve a representative subset of the actual users of the system.
• Position papers: We invite researchers to also publish position papers, which describe novel and innovative ideas. Position papers may also comprise an analysis of currently unsolved problems, or review these problems from a new perspective, in order to contribute to a better understanding of these problems in the research community. We expect that such papers will guide future research by highlighting critical assumptions, motivating the difficulty of a certain problem or explaining why current techniques are not sufficient, possibly corroborated by quantitative and qualitative arguments.

Important dates

• Abstract deadline: April 23, 2020
• Submission deadline: April 30, 2020
• Notification of acceptance: June 23, 2020
• Camera-ready paper: July 2, 2020
• Conference days: September 16-20, 2020

All submission deadlines are 23:59:59 Hawaii Time.

Submissions

Pre-submission of abstracts is a strict requirement. All papers and abstracts have to be submitted electronically via Easychair.
All submissions for research, in-use, and position papers must be in English, and no longer than 15 pages. Papers that exceed this limit will be rejected without review.

Submissions must be in PDF, formatted in the style of the Springer Publications format for Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). For details on the LNCS style, see Springer”s Author Instructions.

Organization

General chairs

• Oliver Kutz (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy)
• Rafael Peñaloza (University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy)

Program chairs

• Michel Dumontier (Maastricht University, the Netherlands)
• Maria Keet (University of Cape Town, South Africa)

>> ICBO | ODLS 2020 <<   1st Call for Papers

https://icbo2020.inf.unibz.it/

Main research track submissions due:  April 20, 2020

————————————————————–

11th International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies (ICBO)

10th Workshop on Ontologies and Data in Life Sciences (ODLS)

held jointly as part of the Bolzano Summer of Knowledge (BOSK 2020)

September 16-19, 2020       Bolzano, Italy

== Scope and Topics ==

The International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies (ICBO) [1] is a premier annual conference series that brings together researchers, students and professionals involved in the development and application of ontologies in all areas of biology, medicine, diseases, human health, genome biology, environment, biomes, nutrition, food, plants, agriculture and others.

This year, ICBO will be held jointly with Ontologies and Data for the Life Sciences (ODLS), an annual workshop series that focuses on ontologies, data management and data processing in the life sciences and in health care. It covers the overall spectrum of biomedical information management, from experimental data acquisition and preprocessing across analysis, structuring and interpretation of data, up to developing structured representations of knowledge, in particular in the form of ontologies, with their various applications.

The theme for ICBO|ODLS 2020 is “Ontology across Boundaries”, although submissions on any topic related to bio-ontologies are welcome. The theme includes, for example:

* Ontologies and associated methods and tools at the practical
interfaces between different yet interrelated disciplines and
communities of practice (e.g. biology–chemistry,
immunology–epidemiology etc.)
* Ontologies and associated methods and tools overcoming boundaries
between basic research and translation
* Ontology as a tool for open science to reduce segregation of
research results and improve access to the full body of knowledge
across scientific disciplines, especially as applied to urgent
topics such as the climate crisis
* Ontologies and associated methods and tools in practice across
national boundaries (e.g. medical ontologies needing to serve
international contexts)
* Ontologies and the socioeconomic boundaries that can lead to
differences in health outcomes in different population groups
* Ontology in translation: ontologies supporting knowledge, data and
applications in multiple languages
* Ontologies in relation: interrelating ontologies (e.g. at different
levels of granularity or specificity) and linking ontologies to
terminologies, models and data standards
* Overcoming the practical boundaries of ontologies in integrated
applications including data annotation, data integration, data
science, machine learning and other artificial intelligence
technologies

ICBO|ODLS 2020 is part of the Bolzano Summer of Knowledge (BOSK) [2], therefore co-located with the 22nd International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW) [3] and the 11th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS) [4], as well as several additional events.

== Important Dates ==
[all dates in 2020]
Main research paper track:
* Submission deadline                  April 20  (Mon)
* Notification                          June 04  (Thu)
* Camera-ready versions                 July 15  (Wed)

All other tracks                TBA  (submission not before June)
Conference dates                September 16-19  (Wed-Sat)

All submission deadlines refer to 23:59:59 anywhere on earth (UTC-12).

== Types of Papers ==

ICBO|ODLS 2020 is soliciting submissions of novel (not previously published nor concurrently submitted) research papers in the areas of the application of ontologies to biomedical problems, ontology-based methods, ontology design and ontology interoperability, at any stage in the process from data creation to use in applications or scientific analyses. Submissions will be welcome from a broad range of approaches to ontology building and use.

In addition, we would like to invite contributions showcasing methods for ontology-based research, including statistical methods, and papers addressing the challenges associated with working with multiple ontologies at the same time, including ontology development, visualization, annotation of data, analysis, and applications.

Accordingly, there are several categories of submissions, corresponding to distinct tracks of the conference:

* full-length research papers (8-10 pages)
* full-length tools and applications papers (8-10 pages)
* poster abstracts (2 pages)
* early career researcher symposium abstracts (5 pages)

A selection of successful poster abstracts will be invited to give flash presentations during the conference.

Contributions must be delivered non-anonymously and as a single PDF file. They must be formatted using the IOS Press template [5] (one-column format, available for Microsoft Word and LaTeX) according to the guidelines for book authors. The same template is required for submissions to FOIS [4] as well as to ICBO and other workshops held in the context of BOSK [2].

== Submission and Proceedings ==

Contributions will need to be submitted via EasyChair. A corresponding link will soon be available at the ICBO|ODLS website [1].

A Best Paper Award, Best Poster Award, Best Tool and Application Award, and Best Early Career Contribution Award will be awarded at the conference.

All accepted papers and abstracts will be published open access in an issue of the IAOA series of CEUR-WS [6]. Moreover, accepted papers will be invited to submit an expanded version to a special issue collection in an open access journal (further details to be announced at the conference website [1]).

== Contact ==

For more information please email us at icbo2020@unibz.it [7].

== Organizing Committee ==

Conference Chairs:
* Janna Hastings (University College London, UK)
* Frank Loebe    (Univ. of Leipzig, Germany)

Tools and Applications Chairs:
* Phillip Lord (Newcastle Univ., UK)
* James Overton (Knocean, inc. & OBO Foundry)

Workshop and Tutorial Chairs:
* Robert Hoehndorf (KAUST, Thuwal, Saudi-Arabia)
* Randi Vita (LJI, La Jolla, USA & OBO Foundry)

Early Career Chairs:
* Adrien Barton (IRIT, Toulouse, France & Univ. of Sherbrooke, Canada)
* Nicole Vasilevsky (Oregon Health & Science Univ., Portland, USA)

Publicity Chair:
* Jennifer Warrender (Newcastle Univ., UK)

Local Organizing Committee at Free Univ. of Bolzano, Italy:
* Oliver Kutz [Local Chair]
* Pietro Galliani
* Guendalina Righetti
* Nicolas Troquard

== Links ==

[1] ICBO|ODLS 2020 website

https://icbo2020.inf.unibz.it/

[2] BOSK 2020 website

https://summerofknowledge.inf.unibz.it/

[3] Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW) 2020 website

https://ekaw2020.inf.unibz.it/

[4] Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS) 2020 website

https://fois2020.inf.unibz.it/

[5] IOS Press templates for book authors

https://www.iospress.nl/service/authors/latex-and-word-tools-for-book-authors/

[6] CEUR Workshop Proceedings: IAOA Series

http://ceur-ws.org/iaoa.html

[7] ICBO|ODLS 2020 contact email

icbo2020@unibz.it

The IAOA event JOWO 2019 – Episode V: The Styrian Autumn of Ontology took place at the Medical University of Graz, Austria, on 23-25 September. The event included twelve workshops, five tutorials, three keynote presentations, and three IAOA meetings, which makes it the largest JOWO event so far. It was a success both in terms of submissions and participants: the call for papers attracted a total of 101 article submissions for all workshops, of which 83 were accepted, and the event counted a little over 100 participants.

The 2019 edition of JOWO hosted workshops that cover a broad spectrum of contemporary applied ontology research, including its foundational aspects (FOUST III), its methodology and quality evaluation (BOG, WOMoCoE), the link between ontologies and data science (DAO-SI), the application of ontologies in specific domains, in particular, cognitive science (CAOS IV), contextual representations of information (CREOL), industry (FOMI), life sciences (ODLS), the concepts of shape, form and structure (SHAPES 5.0), social, legal and economic domains (SoLEEE), digital humanities (WODHSA), and knowledge sharing (WINKS-2).

The tutorials also covered a wide variety of topics ranging from foundational ontologies (FOUNT, TLO), ontology engineering (DOnEReCA), and machine learning with ontologies (MLwO), to biomedicine (SNOMED).

We were very happy to include in our program three keynote speeches by Antony Galton, Yongsheng Gao, and Valentina Presutti, who focused on several aspects of fundamental and applied ontology research.

Finally, the International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA) held three meetings: a General IAOA Meeting, a meeting by the IAOA Education Committee, and the kickoff meeting of the new IAOA Special Interest Group on Applied Ontology in Industry and Standards.

There were many opportunities to interact in a more relaxed atmosphere during the social events, including a reception by the Austrian Federal State of Styria at the beautiful Orangerie. JOWO closed with the traditional Pub Quiz organised by the IAOA Education Committee, which was also a success, with 28 participants, and great fun.

We would like to thank all workshop and tutorial organizers, authors and speakers for their contributions; the programme committee members and additional reviewers for their timely reviewing; the local organization team, led by Pablo Lopez-Garcia and Stefan Schulz, for the smooth organization; and the JOWO Steering Committee for its insightful advice. Moreover, we would like to thank SNOMED International and Das Land Steiermark for providing generous financial support and facilities. More information will follow soon about the edition of the proceedings.

The JOWO 2019 Chairs,
Adrien Barton and Selja Seppälä

Ontobras was held this year in Porto Alegre, from September 2 to 5 and it was a great success. The seminar had 70 participants:  16 from industry, 28 students and 26 academic researchers (lecturers, mainly). Given its highly specialized nature, this can be considered a very good result.

33 papers were received, of which 11 full papers were accepted, plus 6 short papers to be presented as a poster. The Workshop onThesis and Dissertations has received 6 submissions from Ph.D. students and 2 from master students who are developing their thesis with main focus on ontology. Moreover, organizing the seminar has raised the attention of many other Brazilian organizations and researchers that have never participated to Ontobras in the past, thanks to the publicity on Linkedin and social media.  During and after the seminar, several new contacts of interest in the subject have been received. Therefore, the main aims of the seminar were fully achieved:  that of bringing together the community, offering a forum for PostGraduate students and stimulating them to do research in the area, and attracting new players from industry.

The Ontobras organization deeply thanks IAOA for the financial support, which has helped to start the organization earlier than usual and helped to set the subscription fee for students to 200 reals, (44 euros), providing material and food for all of them.  This fee has guaranteed to several non-author students the participation in the conference.

The General Organization

Mara Abel

Joel Luis Carbonera

Both will be part of the Bolzano Summer of Knowledge, which will also host EKAW 2020 and ICBO 2020.

Organization

International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA)
http://iaoa.org/

Research Centre on Knowledge and Data (KRDB)
Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

July 22-25, 2019
Utrecht, Netherlands

http://geographicknowledge.de/iaoa-summer-institute/

Programme:
The need to support spatial reasoning arises in domains as diverse as geographic information systems
and manufacturing, yet there has been little interaction between the industrial and academic communities
in these domains. The IAOA Summer Institute will bring together researchers from these domains
and explore topics in spatial representation and reasoning
such as notions of dimensionality, boundaries, shape, and location.

* What are the commonalities and differences among the research problems
that motivate the various communities that use spatial reasoning?
* Why is there not more ontology reuse and sharing among these communities?
* What applications drive the design of ontologies for spatial reasoning?
For example, location services are increasingly important for many companies.
Knowledge-based design of electromechanical devices with moving parts remains
a challenge in manufacturing.

Facilitators
Werner Kuhn (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Simon Scheider (University of Utrecht)
Michael Gruninger (University of Toronto)