Announcement: First IAOA Summer Institute in Applied Ontology, Tuscany, Italy, July 17-23, 2011

[Obrst, Leo J.]

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First IAOA Summer Institute in Applied Ontology
Firenze, Italy
July 17-23, 2011
Topic: Process Ontology and its Applications

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The International Association for Applied Ontology (www.iaoa.org), in cooperation with the Vespucci Initiative (www.vespucci.org), announces its first Summer Institute in Applied Ontology. The IAOA promotes interdisciplinary research and international collaboration at the intersection of philosophical ontology, linguistics, logic, cognitive science, and computer science, and applications of ontological analysis more generally. 

This first Summer Institute in Applied Ontology will take place July 17-23, 2011, and will focus on the topic of Process Ontology and its applications to the analysis of processes in the human environment, in engineering, and in business. 

The Summer Institute facilitators will be:
Antony Galton (University of Exeter, UK)
Michael Gruninger (University of Toronto, Canada)
Werner Kuhn (University of Muenster, Germany)
David Mark (State University of New York at Buffalo, USA).

Venue: Firenze, Italy (see http://vespucci.org/presentation)

Accommodation: hotel, bed and breakfast, or camp ground in Fiesole (20 minutes by bus from Firenze; shuttle bus or car to venue)

Application: at vespucci.org and www.iaoa.org, starting December 15, 2011
Notification of acceptance: until mid April 2011 (at the latest).
Travel grants may be available for participants with special financial needs, if these are stated and justified in the application.

Goals and Contents:
Understanding processes has become one of the key challenges to society: how much does our climate change, and why? how can deforestation of the Amazon be put under control? how can manufacturing processes be optimized? Process ontology provides the theory, tools, and techniques to analyze processes and to improve the design and use of information systems that support human decisions in dynamic situations. The institute will feature tutorials on ontology, progressing into research discussions and group work on the ontological analysis of processes.

Participants will learn to:
- apply basic ontological distinctions and formal ontology;
- sort out the different kinds of things that go under the name "process";
- identify spatio-temporal patterns underlying processes;
- understand implications of choosing between three- and four-dimensionalism
- relate existing process ontologies to each other;
- specify complex states, processes and events in terms of simpler ones;
- design domain-specific process ontologies (e.g. in manufacturing, e-commerce, geography, biology) from more generic ontologies.