International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems

Deadlines and Further Information

Abstracts: May 3, 2004
Final submissions: May 7, 2004
Acceptance Notification: June 25, 2004
Submission of camera-ready paper: July 30, 2004

Proceedings will be published by IOS Press and available at the conference.

Submission is a two-step procedure: first abstracts, then full
papers. Submitted papers must not exceed 5000 words (including
bibliography). Abstracts should be less than 300 words. Electronic
submission via the website is strongly preferred; if unavailable,
submission via email or postal mail is possible. For details see:
http://www.fois.org or contact one of the program chairs.

Topics

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 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
- Requirements engineering
- Knowledge engineering
- Knowledge management and organization
- Knowledge representation; Qualitative modeling
- Computational lexica; 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, ...