For information on the FOIS 2021 Early Career Symposium, Demonstrations, Ontology Showcase, and workshops and tutorials, please see the relevant web pages.

Submission deadline is 23:59, 29 April 2021 (Hawaii Time). 

FOIS seeks full-length high-quality papers on a wide range of topics. Each submission needs to be submitted as part of one of the tracks, i.e., Foundational, Application and Methods, and Domain Ontology (see below for detailed information on the different tracks). 

While different reviewing criteria are being applied to these tracks, the same formatting requirements apply to all papers: 

Authors are limited to a maximum of two first-authored submissions, with no limit to the number of co-authored submissions, and a maximum of two presentations of accepted papers by any individual.

Reviews will be anonymous. The submission process will include a rebuttal phase.

Submission and Review Criteria for the Foundations Track
  • Scope: foundational papers address content-related ontological issues, their formal representation, and their relevance to some aspect of information systems. Often foundational papers explore domain general ontological topics (e.g. mereology) or are concerned with general categories (e.g. papers on upper ontologies). Papers concerned with the philosophical, logical or mathematical foundations of applied ontology are also included in this track.
  • Review criteria: will consider (1) the significance and clarity of the problem statement; (2) the novelty and weight of the ontological / philosophical / logical / mathematical analysis; (3) the soundness of any formalism, (4) the relevance to some aspect of information systems; and (5) the adequate satisfaction of issues or requirements from the problem statement. If the paper contains theorems without proofs, the proofs should be made available to reviewers as an appendix to the paper. The page limit will not be applied to this appendix, and the appendix will not be included in the final publication.
Submission and Review Criteria for the Applications and Methods Track
  • Scope: papers in this track address novel methods, systems and tools related to building, evaluating, or using ontologies, emphasising the impact of ontology contents on the application. If a paper is about how ontologies are used in some computational system, such as for recommendation, semantic search, or machine learning, or if it is about new methods or tools that, for example, help design, evaluate, modularize, or compare ontologies, then it belongs in this track.
  • Review criteria: will follow typical computer science criteria, including the novelty, significance and soundness of the work as evident in the problem statement and requirements, the related work, as well as the methodology and evaluation, with evaluation typically including implementation, results, and analysis.
Submission and Review Criteria for the Domain Ontology Track
  • Scope: domain ontology papers describe a novel ontology for a specific realm of interest. The goal is not just to reproduce the content of the ontology in some abbreviated form, but to provide added value enabling a reader to better understand and use the ontology. Hence, the paper should focus on providing: (1) background information and an overview of contents (e.g. motivation, domain, scope, requirements, ontology language, modularity, statistical information); (2) a comparison with related ontologies to highlight differences and benefits; (3) a description of methodology and ontology design choices; (4) an evaluation of the ontology against requirements and possibly foundational theory, and (5) discussion of actual or potential use. Moreover, all ontologies discussed in the paper should be accessible to reviewers.
  • Review criteria: will consider the novelty, significance, and soundness of the required elements (just listed above).

Important dates

  • Paper submission deadline: 29 April 2021 (extended)
  • Notifications: 25 June 2021
  • Camera-ready papers: 19 July 2021
  • Conference dates: 13-17 September 2021