Category: News & Events

The Ninth International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2016) [1] was held in Annecy, France, from July 6 to 9, 2016, in co-location with the 22nd International Conference on Conceptual Structures (ICCS 2016).

More than 70 participants attended the conference, which received 81 submissions from 29 countries and all populated continents. The presentations of the 25 accepted papers (ca. 31%) covered a wide range of topics, including foundations, space, time and change, cognition, language and semantics, empiricism and measurement, ontology of engineering, biomedical ontologies and ontology of social reality.

The presentations, together with the talks of the four invited speakers (Gilberto Camara, Fabien Gandon, Friederike Moltmann, Stephen Mumford) were followed by very lively discussions. The PC Chairs of the ninth edition have been Roberta Ferrario and Werner Kuhn, while the General Chair was Giancarlo Guizzardi.

The proceedings of the conference have been published on open access as volume 283 of the Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications (FAIA) series by IOS Press. They are available at [2], itself linked at [3]. The presentations are also available, at [4].

The conference included three satellite activities: Demonstration Track (3 presentations), Early Career Symposium (5 presentations and posters) and Formal Ontology Competition (3 presentations). The Chairs of these activities were Frank Loebe (Demo Track), Adrien Barton, Stefano Borgo and Jean-Rmi Bourguet (ECS), and Fabian Neuhaus (Competition).

The best paper award was won by Claudio Masolo with the paper “Observations and their Explanations”, while the winners of the Formal Ontology Competition were Niels Grewe, Ludger Jansen and Barry Smith with the work “Permanent
Generic Relatedness and Silent Change”.

Annecy, view on the river Thiou.
Moreover, the main conference was preceded by the second edition of the Joint Ontology Workshops (JOWO 2016) [5], which combined four ontology-centered workshops, running in parallel:

CAOS (First International Workshop on Cognition and Ontologies)
OntoCom (Fourth International Workshop on Ontologies and Conceptual Modeling)
NSWO (New Standards for the Working Ontologist)
WOMoCOE (International Workshop on Ontology Modularity, Contextuality and Evolution)

Oliver Kutz and Sergio de Cesare were the Workshop Chairs of JOWO 2016, which included very exciting presentations, both of accepted papers and keynotes by Brandon Bennett, Jrme Euzenat, and Gem Stapleton. The proceedings of the workshops and of the works presented during the satellite activities have been published as CEUR volume 1660 [6].

All information and material can be found at the FOIS 2016 Website [1] and the JOWO 2016 Website [5], respectively.

[1] FOIS 2016 Website
https://www.iaoa.org/fois2016/

[2] FOIS 2016 Proceedings, open access, at the IOS Press website
http://ebooks.iospress.nl/volume/formal-ontology-in-information-systems-proceedings-of-the-9th-international-conference-fois-2016

[3] Proceedings page at the FOIS 2016 Website
https://www.iaoa.org/fois2016/index.php?n=Main.OnlineProceedings

[4] Presentations page at the FOIS 2016 Website
https://www.iaoa.org/fois2016/index.php?n=Main.Presentations

[5] JOWO 2016 Website
https://www.iaoa.org/jowo/2016/

[6] JOWO 2016 Proceedings, including FOIS Satellite Events
http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1660/

IAOA’s3rd Interdisciplinary School on Applied Ontology,ISAO 2016, is held in Bozen-Bolzano, Italy onJune 27-July 1. Its exquisite program covers the course topics ofMereology (A. Varzi),Time and Processes (A. Galton), Geospatial Ontology (G. Camara), Language and Ontology (L. Vieu), and Reasoning over Ontologies and Conceptual Models (A. Artale).

In the week right after ISAO, IAOA’s flagship conference Formal Ontology in Information Systems, FOIS 2016takesplace in Annecy, France during July 6-9, co-located with the International Conference on Conceptual Structures, ICCS 2016, July 5-7. FOIS 2016

• comes with a novel Demonstrations Track,
• hosts an Early Career Symposium and
• a Formal Ontology Competition as well as
• the Joint Ontology WOrkshops, JOWO 2016.

The 2nd Assembly of IAOA is held on July 8, 2016 as a physical and virtual meeting in the context of FOIS 2016. Among its main topics, the current status of therelocation to Switzerland will be discussed.

TheOntology Summit 2016was concerned with the theme “Framing the Conversation: Ontologies within Semantic Interoperability Ecosystems“. It ended theSummit Symposiumin Arlington, Virgina, USAon May 9-10. Analogously to previous years, results are captured in the Ontology Summit Communique 2016.