JOWO 2022: Special Event
Foust is holding a special panel debate called:
The Foustian Struggle: Foundational ontologies in action
https://content.iospress.com/download/applied-ontology/ao220265?id=applied-ontology%2Fao220265
Foundational ontologies have been pivoting the arising of applied ontology as an independent research field and are at the core of the ontological turn in information science. Most of these ontologies have been built paying painstaking attention to philosophical principles and logical formalization leading to the development of complex and highly intertwined systems. Due to their complexity, foundational ontologies are hard to understand and to use properly.
The FOUST project aims to overcome this problem by bringing attention to the practical consequences of using a foundational ontology in applications. When a foundational ontology is used to organize an information system, it brings with it a series of constraints that determine what can be stated in the system. However, if the knowledge engineer cannot fully understand the foundational ontology, she cannot properly decide which foundational ontology is more suitable to the information system she is building. The FOUST project started by organizing a comparison among foundational ontologies on general, yet application driven, modeling cases with the aim of highlighting the different modeling strategies adopted by each foundational ontology. In this way, the ontology user can acquire a better understanding of the ontology and its viewpoint.
This year the FOUST project offers a panel session to discuss the results of the FOUST special issue recently published in the Applied Ontology journal's first issue of 2022.
The goal of the panel is to highlight what has been achieved so far and new ways to move forward in the user-driven comparison of foundational ontologies. The panel includes short presentations showcasting different foundational modelling approaches to the same use cases and will focus on an open discussion to collect proposals to move forward in this collective effort.