All accepted workshops and tutorials will take place as either hybrid or fully virtual events in September 2021 in conjunction with FOIS 2021.
Submissions: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=jowo2021
Accepted Workshops
Cognition And OntologieS (CAOS V)
With the increased interest in the notion of embodied cognition and cognitive computing, the connection between symbolic methods and the cognitive sciences has come to a developmental halt. However, the success in machine learning and neural networks to model cognitive phenomena does not in itself nullify the usefulness of symbolic approaches. The advancement of artificial intelligence, the understanding of cognitive phenomena can greatly benefit from classic methods in knowledge representations and ontologies. CAOS aims to bridge the gap between cognitive science and the formal methods by providing a platform for researchers in either domain to discuss and present their work.
Workshop on Formal Ontology meets Industry (FOMI 2021)
FOMI is an international forum and the flagship meeting of the Industry and Standards Technical Committee (ISTC) of IAOA. Researchers and practitioners are invited to participate in the FOMI workshop to analyze and discuss issues related to methods, theories, tools, and applications based on formal ontologies, knowledge modeling and the semantic interoperability in broad industrial contexts. The objective is to collect results, discuss issues, and share lessons learned by implementing theoretical views and lessons learned by theoretical/ontological analyses of existing industrial application systems.
5th Workshop on Foundational Ontology (FOUST V)
https://foust.inf.unibz.it/foust5/
Foundational ontologies are attempts to systematise categories of thought or reality which are common to all or almost all subject-matters. Commonly considered examples of such categories include ‘object’, ‘quality’, ‘function’, ‘role’, ‘process’, ‘event’, ‘time’, and ‘place’. Among existing foundational ontologies, there is both a substantial measure of agreement and some dramatic disagreements. There is currently no uniform consensus concerning how a foundational ontology should be organised, how far its ‘reach’ should be (e.g., is the distinction between physical and non-physical entities sufficiently fundamental to be included here?), and even what role it should play in relation to more specialised domain ontologies. The purpose of the FOUST workshop is to provide a forum for researchers to present work on specific foundational ontologies as well as foundational ontologies in general and their relations to each other and to the wider ontological enterprise.
The International Workshop on Ontologies and Conceptual Modelling (OntoCom 2021)
https://www.mis.ugent.be/ontocom2021/
While models pervade the information systems lifecycle from requirements to implementation, there appears to be a lack of theoretical foundation in the way that models are developed. As a result it is quite common for practitioners, even working together, to produce different representations of the same real world domain or system. Conversely, a preferred approach would be one in which IS practitioners have the necessary conceptual tools to enable them to accurately represent the things that exist in the real world. Foundational or upper ontologies have the potential to resolve the difficult problems that derive from a lack of a consistent and sound ontological theory. The benefits that can derive from the application of a foundational ontology include improved mapping to the real world domain, increased level of communication and understanding among stakeholders, model reuse, semantic integration and interoperability and increased overall efficiency and effectiveness of information systems development and evolution. OntoCom is intended to be highly interactive and bring together academics and practitioners interested in foundational ontologies and their meta-ontological choices.
Ontologies for Autonomous Robotics (ROBONTICS 2021)
ROBONTICS 2021 is the second edition of a workshop series aimed at the discussion and dissemination of research in robot autonomy based on knowledge-driven approaches, and in particular on formal ontologies. ROBONTICS is open to the different communities working in the fields of robotics, ontology, and knowledge representation and reasoning, and provides the right environment to foster communication and to strengthen interdisciplinary work. In particular, ROBONTICS welcomes research and application-driven works where knowledge-driven approaches are used to overcome open problems in robotics. Reviews of work in progress in this area are also welcome.
Ontology of Social, Legal and Economic Entities (SoLEE 2021)
https://soleeworkshop.wordpress.com/
Understanding the ontological nature of social, legal and economic concepts and institutions is crucial for providing principled modelling in many important domains such as enterprise modelling, business processes, and social ontology. A significant number of fundamental concepts that are ubiquitous in economics, social, and legal sciences – such as value, risk, capability, good, service, exchange, transaction, competition, social norm, group, institution – have only recently been approached from a specifically ontological perspective. It is therefore important to offer a venue to gather the recent contributions to this topic. The workshop encourages submissions on both theoretical and methodological issues in the use of ontologies for modelling social, legal and economic concepts and institutions, as well as submissions on concrete use of ontologies in application for these domains.
Accepted Tutorials
If you’re interested in a tutorial, please make sure you plan on joining it for the entire time. Joining late is often not feasible as organizers have planned interactive sessions where you’re guided through some examples that build on one another.
Tutorial: An Introduction to the BORO Foundation and its Industrial Applications through its Modelling Approaches (Monday, Sept. 13, morning CET)
Lecturers: Chris Partridge, Sergio de Cesare, Pawel Garbacz, Andrew Mitchell
This interactive half-day tutorial introduces the Business Object Reference Ontology (BORO) and its associated methodology (bCLEARer) to re-engineering legacy data and systems through working hands-on with BORO Modelling approaches. BORO is an extensionalist foundational ontology that has been widely applied in industry. Examples include the oil and gas, finance and defence sectors. The modelling approaches that will be used are Space-Time Maps and the associated STM Domain Models, Ontological Euler Diagrams and BORO UML (BUML). The organisers will present the modelling approaches in a way that reveals the ontological foundations of these approaches.
Tutorial: Knowledge acquisition for ontology development (Friday, Sept. 17, afternoon CET)
Lecturer: Prof. Mara Abel
Ontology development is a result of collecting shared consensual knowledge applied to solve a large range of tasks in a community of practice. Ontologies differ from knowledge models in the sense that the semantic is not based on the software application itself, but in the common acquaintance of the terminology among a community under the philosophical view about world understanding. This tutorial explains the distinction between knowledge models and ontologies as a motivation for applying distinctive approaches for knowledge acquisition and modeling for both types of models. It introduces practical steps and techniques for knowledge elicitation with the focus of producing well-founded domain ontologies for industrial projects. We discuss how to select the professionals and legacy material that will be the source of knowledge. We present techniques for literature analysis, open and structure interviews for knowledge elicitation, data analysis for ontology modeling, and preliminary specification of the concepts. The content considers and discusses previously developed cases on oil and gas industry. We aim the explanation would be useful for general use in conceptual modeling tasks.
Tutorial: Verbal and non-verbal predication across the grammatical-conceptual divide
(Monday Sept. 13, 2021, full day CET)
Lecturers: Bridget Copley, Isabelle Roy
Studying natural language data without a knowledge of grammar is like cooking without labels on the spices—it’s quite possible, but it’s helpful to know which spice is in which bottle. That is, it’s helpful to know that a predicate in language gives us information about the kind of entity its argument is. In this tutorial we provide an introduction to the use of verbal and non-verbal predication to study ontology at the grammatical-conceptual divide. In the morning we present some basic tools (natural language syntax, architecture, and compositional semantics), and in the afternoon we zoom in on selected topics. No linguistics background required.