Preliminary Call for Papers INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON FORMAL ONTOLOGY IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOIS'98 In conjunction with the 6th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning KR'98 TRENTO, ITALY, JUNE 6-8, 1998 Under the auspices of the Project ONTOINT (Ontological Tools for Heterogeneous Knowledge Organization and Integration) funded by the Italian National Research Council Research on ontology is becoming increasingly widespread in the computer science community. Its importance has been recognized in fields as diverse as qualitative modelling of physical systems, natural language processing, knowledge engineering, information integration, database design, geographic information science, and intelligent information access. Various workshops addressing the engineering aspects of ontology have been held in the past few years. However, ontology - by its very nature - ought to be a unifying discipline. Insights in this field have potential impacts on the whole area of information systems. In order to provide a solid general foundation for this work, it is therefore important to focus on the common scientific principles and open problems arising from current tools, methodologies, and applications of ontology. The purpose of this conference is to take a first step in this direction. As the heterogeneity of the program committee indicates, the conference will have a strongly interdisciplinary character. Expected participants include computer science practitioners as well as linguists, logicians, and philosophers. Although the primary focus of the conference is on theoretical issues, methodological proposals as well as papers addressing concrete applications from a well-founded theoretical perspective are welcome. TOPICS Examples of problem areas that may be addressed at the conference include: THEORETICAL ISSUES * Foundations: parthood, constitution, identity, integrity, dependence, causality * Kinds of entity: particulars vs. universals, continuants vs. occurrents, abstracta vs. concreta, attributes, relations, qualities, quantities, tropes or moments, states, situations, environments * Matter, space, time, motion, change * Natural kinds, organisms, artifacts * The ontology of social reality: legal and administrative entities, artistic expressions * The ontology of information and information processing: representations, signs, software products, virtual reality, cyberspace * Top-level ontological taxonomies: new proposals or critical analyses of existing ones * Cognitive foundations of ontological distinctions * Kinds of ontology: top-level ontologies, domain ontologies, task ontologies, application ontologies * Ontological commitment APPLICATION AREAS * Knowledge organization, integration and standardization * Intelligent information access * Information systems design * Knowledge engineering * Conceptual modelling * Qualitative modelling * Lexical semantics * Terminology integration * Product knowledge integration * Geographic information systems * Legal information systems TOOLS AND METHODOLOGIES * Ontological and linguistic instruments for conceptual analysis * Methodologies for ontology development, maintenance, and integration SUBMISSION OF PAPERS Papers will be selected on the basis of a rigorous review of full paper contributions. Authors should submit 5 copies to the Conference Chair by December 19, 1997. Papers received after the deadline or not conforming to the submission format will be rejected without review. The proceedings will be printed by a major publisher and will be available at the conference. Final camera-ready copies of the accepted papers will be due by March 9, 1998. Authors will be responsible for preparing the final camera-ready in conformity with the formatting requirements laid down by the publisher. Submitted papers must be unpublished and substantially different from papers under review. Papers that have been or will be presented at small workshops/symposia whose proceedings are available only to attendees may be submitted. Each submission should include a title page containing the title, author(s), affiliation(s), submitting author's mailing address, telephone number, fax number and e-mail address, as well as an abstract and keywords indicating the topic areas listed above that best describe the contribution. Submissions must be at most 16 pages, excluding the title page and the bibliography, with a maximum of 38 lines per page and an average of 75 characters per line (corresponding to the LaTeX article-style, 12pt) using LaTeX or Microsoft Word. Papers should be sent in 5 copies. Fax or electronic submissions will not be accepted. Those proposing to submit papers must complete the form at the WWW address by Monday December 15, 1997. If intending authors do not have WWW access, then an e-mail message must be sent to by the same date, giving details of any proposed submission in the following format: Title: