From Oliver.Kutz at unibz.it Thu May 3 14:58:09 2018 From: Oliver.Kutz at unibz.it (Kutz Oliver) Date: Thu, 3 May 2018 12:58:09 +0000 Subject: [iaoa-general] Call for Papers - JOWO@FOIS 2018 Message-ID: JOWO at FOIS 2018 CALL for PAPERS The Joint Ontology WOrkshops (JOWO 2018) will take place in September in Cape Town, South Africa, as a pool of satellite events of the FOIS 2018 conference. Previous JOWO editions were held in 2017 in Bolzano (Italy), in conjunction with FOIS 2016 in Annecy (France), and at IJCAI 2015 in Buenos Aires (Argentina). The JOWO workshops address a wide spectrum of topics related to ontology research, ranging from Cognitive Science to Knowledge Representation, Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, Logic, Philosophy, and Linguistics. JOWO is especially suitable for interdisciplinary and innovative formats. The following workshops are being organized: * Cognition And OntologieS 3 (CAOS-CEX). Chairs: Maria M. Hedblom, Tarek R. Besold and Oliver Kutz (http://caos.inf.unibz.it); * Epistemology in Ontologies II (EPINON). Chairs: Daniele Porello and Claudio Masolo (http://www.loa.istc.cnr.it/workshops/epinon2018/home.html); * 6th International Workshop on Ontologies and Conceptual Modelling (Onto.Com). Chairs: Sergio de Cesare, Frederik Gailly, Giancarlo Guizzardi, Mark Lycett, Chris Partridge and Oscar Pastor (http://www.mis.ugent.be/ontocom2018/); * Ontology for Heterogeneous Knowledge in Design and Planning (KODeP). Chairs: Maria Rosaria Stufano Melone, Domenico Camarda and Stefano Borgo (https://kodepjowo.wordpress.com/); * Ontology of Economics. Chairs: Daniele Porello, Nicola Guarino and Giancarlo Guizzardi; * BadOntoloGy (BOG). Chairs: Giancarlo Guizzardi, Oliver Kutz, Rafael Pe?aloza and Nicolas Troquard (http://bog.inf.unibz.it/); * Data meets Applied Ontologies in Open Science and Innovation (DAO-SI). Chairs: Roberto Confalonieri, Alessandro Mosca and Diego Calvanese (https://smart.inf.unibz.it/index.php/2018/03/27/daosi2018/). As in earlier years, all contributions to JOWO workshops will be published in a joint CEUR proceedings volume, together with the contributions to the Early Career Symposium. * JOWO 2015: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1517/ * JOWO 2016: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1660/ * JOWO 2017: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2050/ IMPORTANT DATES - June 18, 2018 - Submission deadline for workshop contributions - July 20, 2018 - Acceptance notification - August 15, 2018 - Camera-ready version due for proceedings - Sept 17-18, 2018 - JOWO 2018 at FOIS - Sept 19-21, 2018 - FOIS 2018 main conference For further inquiries please contact the chairs of the specific workshops. JOWO chairs Ludger Jansen, University of Rostock (ludger.jansen at uni-rostock.de) Daniele P. Radicioni, University of Torino (radicion at di.unito.it) From Oliver.Kutz at unibz.it Thu May 3 15:13:58 2018 From: Oliver.Kutz at unibz.it (Kutz Oliver) Date: Thu, 3 May 2018 13:13:58 +0000 Subject: [iaoa-general] Call for submissions: FOIS 2018 Ontologies Competition Message-ID: We cordially invite you to submit to the FOIS 2018 ontologies competition, which will be held in conjunction with the FOIS (Formal Ontology in Information Systems) 2018 conference in Cape Town, South Africa, September 17-21. This year's contest is around ontologies that connect to the physical world in a quantitative way. The goal is to offer approaches to subjects that are of broad relevance across the physical sciences and technology that can be applied to realistically complex problems, and demonstrate how they work for representing and querying data. Examples of subjects that would be of interest are: 1. Spatially varying qualities such as temperature, wind speed, precipitation as it varies over an extended region as used in climate work, engineering models that measure spatial patterns of stress in materials, patterns of population and related aspects such as travel patterns and infrastructure, relevant for urban planning or study of epidemics, or distributions of substances or cells in the body as they evolve. 2. System of physical quantities - the question of units and conversions between them, physical laws and formulas that relate them, "base" versus "derived" quantities, dimensionless quantities, quantities that vary in time. 3. Temporal evolution and patterns: Time course of disease, markets, dynamics of physical processes, longitudinal studies, treatment and clinical follow-up. # Requirements * The ontology should be represented using OWL or Common logic, specifying a reasoner for the fragment of logic used. * A representative data set (which can be simulated) that is sufficient to demonstrate utility * A set of queries demonstrating expressiveness and utility and which produce expected results Submissions will be in the form of a short paper giving an explanation of the approach and instructions for demonstrating the work. The submitter should document any software that needs to be installed, as well as step by step instructions for executing the queries. Reviewers will follow these instructions and reproducibility will be part of the evaluation. Packaging that requires minimal installation, such as by a self-contained system that uses docker, would be beneficial. Submitted papers should not exceed 5 pages (not including instructions) and include an abstract of no more than 300 words. Papers should be submitted non-anonymously in PDF format following IOS Press formatting guidelines. Accepted submissions will be published in the JOWO proceedings. The winner of the competition will receive a prize of $500 USD or equivalent All material should be publicly available, for example via a Github repository, clearly licensed and accompanied by a descriptive Readme. Evaluation criteria. - How realistic are the use case and data? - Expressive power - Range of applicability - is the work useful across different domains - Efficiency and scaling - Conformity to one or more upper level ontologies - Ease of reproducing the query results The Easychair submission page can be found at: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=jowo2018. You will be asked to choose a track. Choose "Ontology Competition". Important dates: * Submissions due June 15 * Notification July 15 * Camera ready due: Aug 15, 2018 Presentation at FOIS September 17-21. FOIS website: http://www.iaoa.org/fois/2018.html Competition website: http://fois2018.cs.uct.ac.za/?page_id=280 Organizers: Alan Ruttenberg(alanruttenberg at gmail.com), Melanie Courtot(mcourtot at gmail.com) Program committee to be announced. From Oliver.Kutz at unibz.it Fri May 4 16:14:29 2018 From: Oliver.Kutz at unibz.it (Kutz Oliver) Date: Fri, 4 May 2018 14:14:29 +0000 Subject: [iaoa-general] Fourth Interdisciplinary School on Applied Ontology, September 10-15, 2018 Message-ID: <11CA5EFE-2E3C-4FC7-8C58-37ADC5273CA2@unibz.it> ISAO 2018 - CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: The International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA) and the University of Cape Town, South Africa, are proud to announce the Fourth Interdisciplinary School on Applied Ontology (ISAO) September 10-15, 2018 -- Cape Town, South Africa http://isao2018.cs.uct.ac.za/ Description ----------- World-class experts in different disciplines (Applied Ontology, Biomedical Ontology, Logic and Philosophy, Conceptual Modeling, Semantic Technologies) will meet for a week with students, researchers and practitioners, to offer courses in complementary aspects of Applied Ontology. The school will be a full immersion experience in ontology, where lecturers engage in open discussions with each other, interact with the participants, and supervise micro-projects addressing Applied Ontology problems. ISAO will take place in the beautiful city of Cape Town, South Africa, and is open to students, researchers and practitioners. Previous schools were held in * 2016 - Bozen/Bolzano, Italy http://isao2016.inf.unibz.it/ * 2014 - Vitoria, Brazil http://iaoa.org/isao2014/ * 2012 - Trento, Italy http://iaoa.org/isao2012/ Program ------- The following lecturers are already confirmed: * Maureen Donnelly, University of Buffalo, New York, USA (Mereology, Location, and Time) * Stefan Schulz, Medical University of Graz, Austria (Biomedical Ontology) * Peter Simons, Trinity College Dublin and University of Salzburg * Arina Britz, Stellenbosch University, South Africa (First-order Logic and Description Logics) * Maria Keet, University of Cape Town, South Africa (Semantics and Conceptual Modelling) Registration ------------ Registration to the school is on a first-come first-served basis. Check the registration page for further information and to register soon: http://isao2018.cs.uct.ac.za/registration.html Reduced registration fees are available for IAOA members. For information on membership, benefits and how to join, please see: http://iaoa.org/membership/membership.html Organization ------------ International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA) http://iaoa.org/ Department of Computer Science, University of Cape Town, South Africa https://www.cs.uct.ac.za/ General chair: Aldo Gangemi Programme chair: Antony Galton Local organisation: Maria Keet, Zubeida Khan, Zola Mahlaza Contact: Website: http://isao2018.cs.uct.ac.za/ General inquiries: aldo.gangemi at unibo.it local inquiries: mkeet at cs.uct.ac.za From radicion at di.unito.it Wed May 2 12:56:57 2018 From: radicion at di.unito.it (daniele radicioni) Date: Wed, 2 May 2018 12:56:57 +0200 Subject: [iaoa-general] Second Call for Paper: Special Issue of the Journal of Applied Ontology "Meaning in Context: ontologically and linguistically motivated representations of objects and events." Message-ID: (Apologies for cross posting) Special Issue of the Journal of Applied Ontology "Meaning in Context: ontologically and linguistically motivated representations of objects and events." https://submissions.iospress.com/applied-ontology/CIM Overview Dealing with context is a key factor in the conceptualization of human experience, and a major issue for understanding natural language. It is well known that some properties of objects and events may have different cognitive salience according to their context of occurrence, thus determining access to partial relevant information rather than to all information. One typical example is that of an orange being passed between two children, or the same orange peeled on a table: in the former case the roundness prevails over other traits, and the orange is being used to play; in the latter one, the edible features are those mostly conveyed by the scene. Interpreting events poses contextual challenges as well: (in how far) does a given event allow for different interpretations, like it might happen for revenge/self defense? Similar selectional mechanisms underlie figurative uses of word meanings, such as metonymy and metaphors among others, that intrinsically characterize the interface between knowledge and language. Contextual access to objects and events needs to be further investigated, shared conceptualizations and terminologies are needed, as well as more robust approaches, including connections to domain and formal ontologies. The design of ontological and linguistic resources that account for the semantic phenomena involved in the contextual interpretation of objects and events requires collecting information and devising context-aware procedures. In an era where most research is committed to statistical approaches, e.g. vector representations of the linguistic context and neural architectures, pairing the natural language semantic interpretation process and formal ontology may improve the inferential capacities of artificial agents with the explanatory power that is less relevant in those mainstream approaches. Methods traditionally adopted to elaborate text documents exhibit limitations in representing and processing objects and events. Many efforts are being put in grasping text documents? semantics based on semantically shallow approaches, whilst natural language inference demands for deep interpretation models, allowing to handle properties, functions, and roles, among others, to deal with commonsense and to produce explanations. A different approach relies on lexical information: several large-scale lexical resources, such as WordNet (https://wordnet.princeton.edu), BabelNet (http://babelnet.org), FrameNet (https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/fndrupal/), and ImagAct (http://imagact.lablita.it/index.php?lang=en), among others, have been proposed in the last few years and have been successfully employed to bridge the gap between knowledge representations and natural language. However, to cope with contextual access to objects and events involves many additional features still lacking in such resources. Neither shallow representations of NL semantics nor lexical resources alone provide sufficient ground to account for contextual phenomena. Relevant areas include, but are not limited to: events representation and retrieval, event sequences, contextual features representation, trend detection, knowledge discovery, word sense disambiguation, ontology alignment, opinion mining and sentiment analysis, and conceptual similarity, among others. All proposed approaches must address the issue of representation of context, and suitable procedures to use context and context aware meaning representations of objects and events. The ideal submission should provide evidence that context improves the performance of systems on real-world applications and/or provides useful insights and explanations on systems? output. Topics of Interest Research works submitted to the special issue should foster scientific advances whether and to what extent objects and events representation and processing can be linked to the context where they occur. The following is a tentative list of relevant topics: - theoretical foundations for the use of AI techniques to deal with context and with changing/evolving objects and events; - KR frameworks to represent mutable/evolving objects and events, including formal ontologies, conceptual spaces and distributed representations; - formal methods for reasoning in evolving scenarios; - theoretical, methodological, experimental, and application-oriented aspects of knowledge engineering and knowledge management centered on events and evolving objects; - use cases and application scenarios (e.g., in law, medicine) where contextual information impacts on objects/events representation and processing; - linguistic approaches to context analysis; - context-aware lexical resources to describe objects and events; - context-aware topic and event detection and tracking, knowledge discovery; - context-aware frame semantics; - entity linking and word sense disambiguation; - representation of context in the Semantic Web; - surveys on the adoption of contextual information in Cognitive Science, NLP and Ontological Modeling; - context-based explainable Artificial Intelligence. Timeline - Manuscript Submission Deadline: July 23rd 2018; - Acceptance Notification: November 26th 2018; - Final Manuscript Due: February 26th 2019. Submission Guidelines Submission guidelines can be found on the Journal Site, https://www.iospress.nl/journal/applied-ontology/?tab=submission-of-manuscripts This special issue welcomes original high-quality contributions that have been neither published in nor submitted to any journals or refereed conferences. Extended versions of (properly referenced) conference papers should include at least 30% of new material. Please, clearly specify in the cover letter that the paper is to be considered for the special issue on "Meaning in Context: ontologically and linguistically motivated representations of objects and events." Guest Editors Valerio Basile, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, basile at di.uniroma1.it Tommaso Caselli, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands, t.caselli at rug.nl Daniele P. Radicioni, University of Turin, Italy, radicion at di.unito.it : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : Daniele Radicioni, PhD Department of Computer Science University of Turin Corso Svizzera, 185 10149 - Torino phone: +39 011 6706802 fax: +39 011 751603 http://www.di.unito.it/~radicion From Oliver.Kutz at unibz.it Sun May 20 12:01:39 2018 From: Oliver.Kutz at unibz.it (Kutz Oliver) Date: Sun, 20 May 2018 10:01:39 +0000 Subject: [iaoa-general] Call for Industry Demonstrations and Papers, FOIS 2018 Cape Town Message-ID: We invite submissions from industry on the industrial application of ontologies and semantic technology at this year?s 10th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2018); please see http://fois2018.cs.uct.ac.za/ and the Demonstrations and Industry Track page at http://fois2018.cs.uct.ac.za/?page_id=359 Contributions from industry may take the form of demonstrations or formal papers, or a combination of the two. Papers will be published in the proceedings for the Workshop component of FOIS, the Joint Ontology WOrkshops (JOWO 2018). Please see the JOWO page at http://www.iaoa.org/jowo2018/ Formal papers and demonstrations should be related to the topics of interest of the main FOIS conference. The scope for papers and demonstrations includes software for the ontology lifecycle as well as ontology-based software, for example: * Computational environments and prototypes for ontological engineering * Practical ontology projects * Advances in applying ontologies and lessons learned * Late-breaking results of innovative uses of ontology-based and/or ontology engineering techniques * Use of ontology in industrial and business applications * Ontological representations of software engineering techniques and frameworks * Industry and enterprise ontologies and ontology standards e.g. finance, biomedical * Regulatory and compliance applications of ontology * Ontology driven software engineering * Deriving ontology applications from business concept (reference) ontologies * Use of ontologies in machine learning, natural language processing or artificial intelligence, * Use of ontologies in linked data or in Semantic Web based inference processing applications * Findings about the nature and style of ontology needed for a given type of industrial application In line with the scope and audience of FOIS and JOWO, papers and demonstrations should indicate the ontological motivations/principles for the presented technical application or solution. The submission should also answer these questions: * What is the research background and application context of the paper or demonstration? * For whom is it most interesting/useful? (e.g., for business data owners, corporate compliance officers or other corporate stakeholders, ontology researchers, ontology developers, ontology practitioners, and/or for graduate or undergraduate students?) * What are the key technologies used and what are the technical challenges addressed? In addition, these points should be considered: * How does the system, application or infrastructure relate to pre-existing work and what is its contribution to ontology research? * The specific use or uses of ontology in the application (if an application is described) * Whether any given ontology formally describes real things or data about things * The logical formalism in which any given ontology is framed * Relationship of the ontology to application data if any * Ontology development techniques followed * Use or non-use of upper ontologies, along with rationale for same * Ontology quality or assessment measures followed, if any * Any other considerations relating to the application of semantics or model theory in any given ontology e.g. formal ontological stances (realism, nominalism etc.) # Formal Papers We invite formal paper submissions relevant to the area of ontology and related information systems and which address the topics of the FOIS Conference. Technical reports on ontology-based software systems (free or commercial), descriptions of completed work, and work in progress are all welcome, as are papers on industry ontologies, standards and regulatory applications. Authors must submit a paper that should be between 6 to 10 pages in the FOIS format (see http://fois2018.cs.uct.ac.za/?page_id=8). All paper submissions will undergo a common review process alongside those for demonstrations. Formal papers for which it is intended that there is also a demonstration component should clearly indicate this in the abstract. Accepted papers will be published in the JOWO Workshop Proceedings. # Demonstrations The FOIS 2018 Industry Track Demo Sessions are designed to provide an exciting and highly interactive way to demonstrate ontology research. This element of the Industry Track complements the overall program of the FOIS conference and is an excellent forum to advertise the applicability of results and software, as well as to receive feedback from the international ontology research community. Demonstrations are intended to showcase innovative formal ontology related implementations and technologies in industry. Demonstrations of ontology-based software systems (free or commercial), whether these are completed work or work in progress, are all welcome. We explicitly welcome entries from commercial providers. However, submissions for demonstrations should go beyond pure advertisements of commercial software packages and convey some scientific contribution. Demonstrations should make clear what will be demonstrated and in particular point out what makes the demonstration a novel showcase. Submitters should further specify the following: * What exactly will be demonstrated? * What will attendees of the demonstration learn? * How does the demonstrated system, application or infrastructure relate to pre-existing work? * Why is it a novel showcase in ontology research? Authors must submit an extended abstract for evaluation. This should ideally run to two or three pages and should be at most 5 pages. All demonstration submissions will undergo a common review process alongside formal papers. Authors are strongly encouraged to include in their submission a link to where the demo (live or recorded video) can be found. They should also make clear what exactly will be demonstrated to the participants. # Submission Details (Papers and Demonstrations) All submissions must be made electronically via the EasyChair conference submission system at: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=jowo2018 (please, select 'Demo-Industry?). Demonstration descriptions and formal papers shall be submitted non-anonymously in PDF format. Formal papers shall follow IOS Press formatting guidelines found at http://www.iospress.nl/service/authors/latex-and-word-tools-for-book-authors/ For demonstrations it is possible to present remotely if necessary, but at least one of the presenters must be a registered participant at the conference. Authors of formal papers are required both to register and to attend and present their paper in person at the FOIS conference. # IMPORTANT DATES * Industry and Demo Track Submissions due: 25 JUNE 2018 * Notifications to submitters: 25 JULY 2018 * Camera-ready versions due: 15 AUG 2018 # Industry and Demonstrations Track Chairs: * Mike Bennett (Hypercube Ltd., UK) * Key-Sun Choi (KAIST, South Korea)