[Corpora-List] Call for Participation - 6th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2010)

[Paul Buitelaar]

                            FOIS 2010
               Sixth International Conference on
             Formal Ontology in Information Systems
                    (co-located with KR 2010)

                 http://fois2010.mie.utoronto.ca


         C A L L    F O R    P A R T I C I P A T I O N



CONFERENCE DESCRIPTION

The FOIS conference series began with the first meeting in Trento,
Italy, in June 1998, which was followed by meetings in 2001, 2004,
2006, and 2008. The sixth FOIS conference will be held in Toronto,
Canada, on 11-14 May 2010.

Starting from this conference, FOIS will be an official initiative of
the new International Association for Ontology and its Applications
(IAOA, www.iaoa.org), which will hold its first Assembly on May 13th.
IAOA members will be entitled to get reduced rates for conference
registration (see below - early registration deadline March 12).

Ontology began life in ancient times as a fundamental part of
philosophical enquiry concerned with the analysis and categorisation
of what exists. In recent years, the subject has taken a practical
turn with the advent of complex computerised information systems which
are reliant on robust and coherent representations of their subject
matter. The systematisation and elaboration of such representations
and their associated reasoning techniques constitute the modern
discipline of formal ontology, which is now being applied to such
diverse domains as artificial intelligence, computational linguistics,
bioinformatics, GIS, knowledge engineering, information retrieval, and
the Semantic Web. Researchers in all these areas are becoming
increasingly aware of the need for serious engagement with ontology,
understood as a general theory of the types of entities and relations
making up their respective domains of enquiry, to provide a solid
foundation for their work.

FOIS is intended to provide a meeting point for researchers from these
and other disciplines with an interest in formal ontology, where both
theoretical issues and concrete applications can be explored in a
spirit of genuine interdisciplinarity.

CONFERENCE ORGANISATION

    Conference chair: Nicola Guarino (ISTC-CNR, Trento, Italy)
      Program chairs: Antony Galton (University of Exeter, UK)
                      Riichiro Mizoguchi (Osaka University, Japan)
Local organisation:  Chris Welty (IBM Research, Hawthorne, NY, USA)
                      Michael Gruninger (University of Toronto, Canada)


TOPICS COVERED

Topic areas of particular interest to the conference are:

Foundational Issues
*  Kinds of entity: particulars vs universals, continuants vs
    occurrents, abstracta vs concreta, dependent vs independent,
    natural vs artificial
*  Formal relations: parthood, identity, connection, dependence,
    constitution, subsumption, instantiation
*  Vagueness and granularity
*  Identity and change
*  Formal comparison among ontologies
*  Ontology of physical reality (matter, space, time, motion, ...)
*  Ontology of biological reality (genes, proteins, cells,
    organisms, ...)
*  Ontology of artefacts, functions and roles
*  Ontology of mental reality and agency (beliefs, intentions and
    other mental attitudes; emotions, ...)
*  Ontology of social reality (institutions, organizations, norms,
    social relationships, artistic expressions, ...)
*  Ontology of the information society (information, communication,
    meaning negotiation, ...)
*  Ontology and Natural Language Semantics, Ontology and Cognition

Methodologies and Applications
*  Top-level vs application ontologies
*  Ontology integration and alignment; role of reference ontologies
*  Ontology-driven information systems design
*  Ontology-based application systems
*  Requirements engineering
*  Knowledge engineering
*  Knowledge management and organization
*  Knowledge representation; Qualitative modeling
*  Computational lexicons; Terminology
*  Information retrieval; Question-answering
*  Semantic web; Web services; Grid computing
*  Domain-specific ontologies, especially for: Linguistics,
    Geography, Law, Library science, Biomedical science, E-business,
    Enterprise integration, ...

PROGRAMME

The programme will comprise three invited talks:

Francis Jeffry Pelletier: Ontological Lessons from the Semantics of
Mass and Count Nouns
John Bateman: Ontological Diversity: The Case from Space
Alan Rector: Knowledge-Driven Software and "Fractal tailoring":
Ontologies in Development Environments for Clinical Systems

as well as 28 submitted papers. In addition, there will be a poster
session and two workshops:
- The 4th International Workshop on Modular Ontologies
- Workshop on Ontology Education


REGISTRATION

Registration for FOIS may be done from the AAAI web-site at
http://www.aaai.org/Forms/fois-registration-form.php Note that there
are reduced rates for members of the International Association for
Ontology and its Applications (IAOA). The deadline for early
registration is 12th March 2010.

Registration includes attendance at the FOIS workshop
programme. Workshop-only registration is also possible.

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