FOIS2010 call for papers

[Galton, Antony]

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         |                                          |
         |                 FOIS 2010                | 
         |    Sixth International Conference on     |
         |  Formal Ontology in Information Systems  |
         |       http://www.formalontology.org      |
         |                                          |
         |      C A L L   F O R    P A P E R S      |
         |                                          |  
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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, during 11-14 May 2010, and we are now calling for papers to be
considered for inclusion in the conference.

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

We seek high-quality papers on a wide range of topics. While authors
may focus on fairly narrow and specific issues, all papers should
emphasize the relevance of the work described to formal ontology and
to information systems. Papers that completely ignore one or the other
of these aspects will be considered as lying outside the scope of the
meeting.  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, ... 

DEADLINES AND FURTHER INFORMATION

Submissions:  23 October 2009 
Notification of acceptance: 18 December 2009 
Final camera-ready submission: 15 January 2010 
Conference: 11-14 May 2010

Submitted papers should not exceed 5000 words (including
bibliography). Details of the submission process, and formatting
guidelines, will be provided on the conference web page at
http://fois2010.mie.utoronto.ca. Proceedings will be published by IOS
Press and available at the conference.