Category: Conferences & Workshops

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)

The Joint Ontology Workshops will take place at the Medical University of Graz, September 23-25, 2019. This fifth edition will include 12 workshops and 4 tutorials.

In addition to workshops, JOWO will be hosting keynotes and joint panel sessions, as well as meetings of IAOA Special Interest Groups and Technical Committees.

Website:

https://www.iaoa.org/jowo/2019/

Important Dates:

– January 15, 2019 (passed): Workshop proposal submission deadline – you can find the expired call for workshops here
– January 31, 2019 (passed): Workshop acceptance notification
– February 25, 2019 (passed): 1st call for papers to be distributed by workshop organizers
– May 15, 2019: Suggested latest paper submission deadline
– September 23-25, 2019: JOWO 2019 in Graz

For workshop-specific detailed timelines, see the workshop pages.

Organization team:

JOWO 2019 Chairs:
Adrien Barton, CNRS-IRIT, Toulouse, France & University of Sherbrooke, Canada
Selja Seppälä, University College Cork, Ireland

JOWO 2019 Local Organization:
Catalina Martínez Costa, Medical University of Graz, Austria
Jose Antonio Miñarro Giménez, Medical University of Graz, Austria
Stefan Schulz, Medical University of Graz, Austria

JOWO Steering Committee:
Stefano Borgo, Laboratory of Applied Ontology (LOA), Trento, Italy
Oliver Kutz, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
Frank Loebe, University of Leipzig, Germany
Fabian Neuhaus, Otto-von-Guericke-University of Magdeburg, Germany

For further inquiries please contact jowo2019@gmail.com.

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.