[protege-discussion] CALL FOR POSTERS - 5th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems

[Paul Buitelaar]

[Apologies for multiple copies.]
[Please forward this information to young scientists (master students, PhD students) who might be 
interested in playing an active role at FOIS 2008.]

**** FOIS 2008 CALL FOR POSTERS
****
**** The 5th International Conference
**** on Formal Ontology in Information Systems
****
**** http://fois08.dfki.de
****
**** October 31st - November 3rd, 2008
**** Saarbrücken, Germany
**** DFKI, Competence Center Semantic Web
**** http://semanticweb.dfki.de/


Conference Description
----------------------
Since its inception ten years ago, the International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information 
Systems has explored the multiple perspectives on the notion of ontology that have arisen from such 
diverse research communities as philosophy, logic, computer science, cognitive science, linguistics, and 
various scientific domains.

As ontologies have been applied in new and exciting domains such as the World Wide Web, 
bioinformatics, and geographical information systems, it has become evident that there is a need for 
ontologies that have been developed with solid theoretical foundations based on philosophical, 
linguistic, and logical analysis. Similarly, there is also a need for theoretical research that is driven by 
the issues that have been raised by recent work in the more applied domains.

FOIS is intended to be a forum in which to explore this interplay between the theoretical insights of 
formal ontology and their application to information systems and emerging semantic technologies.

Invited Speakers
----------------
*  Johanna Seibt (Aarhus Universitet, Denmark)
*  Mike Uschold (Reinvent Technology, Canada)
*  York Sure (SAP Research, Germany)

Accepted Papers
--------------
The list of accepted papers is available via http://fois08.dfki.de/joomla/index.php/papers .

Poster Session
--------------
The poster session at FOIS 2008 shall give young scientists the opportunity to present their current 
work related to formal ontology in information systems and discuss their approach, results, problems 
and methods with the other participants of the conference. The selection of poster contributions will be 
based on submitted research papers and pay specific attention to their relevance to the topics of FOIS 
2008.

The poster proceedings compiled from the contributions will be published electronically and made 
available via the conference web page.

Important Dates and Further Information
---------------------------------------
*  Submissions: August 31, 2008
*  Acceptance Notification: September 22, 2008
*  Submission of camera-ready papers: October 5, 2008
*  Electronic publication of poster proceedings: October 20, 2008
*  Conference: October 31 - November 3, 2008

Submitted poster presentations must not exceed 6 pages (including bibliography). They should be 
submitted electronically in the form of a pdf-file (formatted according to the IOS paper guidelines 
http://www.iospress.nl/authco/instruction_crc.html) to be mailed to fois08 at easychair.org.
Further information will be provided on the conference web page:
http://fois08.dfki.de

Chairs
------
Conference Chair
*  Nicola Guarino (ISTC-CNR, Trento, Italy)
Program Chairs
*  Carola Eschenbach (University of Hamburg, Germany)
*  Michael Gruninger (University of Toronto, Canada)
Local Organization: DFKI - Competence Center Semantic Web
*  Paul Buitelaar (DFKI GmbH, Saarbrücken, Germany)
*  Massimo Romanelli (DFKI GmbH, Saarbrücken, Germany)
*  Michael Sintek (DFKI GmbH, Kaiserslautern, Germany)

Topics
------
We seek contributions 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.
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: Biomedical science, eBusiness, Enterprise integration, 
Geography, Law, Library science, Linguistics,...