JOWO 2019: Workshops



The Joint Ontology Workshops take place at the Medical University of Graz, September 23-25, 2019.

This fifth edition of the Joint Ontology Workshops (JOWO 2019) includes the following workshops (click to expand):

BOG: 2nd International Workshop on Bad or Good Ontology

Chairs: Torsten Hahmann, Rafael Peñaloza, Stefan Schulz, Giancarlo Guizzardi, Oliver Kutz, Nicolas Troquard

BOG Website

As ontologies are used in more domains and applications and as they grow in size, the consequences of bad ontology design become more critical. Bad ontologies may be inconsistent, have unwanted consequences, be ridden with anti-patterns, or simply be incomprehensible. In general, bad ontologies present design mistakes that make their use and maintenance problematic or impossible.

Programmers have had access to various tools, such as debuggers or linters, to help identify stylistic errors, suspicious constructs, or logical errors, to avoid bad program design. Similar methods and tools are needed for ontology engineering.

This workshop aims to bring together research on all aspects to bad or good ontology design, including use cases and systematic reviews of bad or good ontology design, techniques and tools for diagnosing, explaining, and repairing bad ontologies, and approaches or benchmarks for evaluating such techniques.

We welcome original contributions about all topics related to bad or good ontologies, including but not limited to:
- systematic analysis of ontologies for symptoms of bad ontology design
- cataloguing of symptoms of bad ontology design
- methods for detecting or explaining symptoms
- metrics and methods to gauge ontology quality
- design methods that likely result in bad ontologies
- principled methods to avoid building bad ontologies
- benchmarks of bad or good ontologies for evaluating diagnostic and repairing methods

CAOS IV: Cognition And OntologieS

Chairs: Oliver Kutz, Maria M. Hedblom, Guendalina Righetti, Danielle Porello, Claudio Masolo

CAOS IV Website

The purpose of the workshop is to bridge the gap between the cognitive sciences and research on ontologies and, thus, to create a venue for researchers interested in interdisciplinary aspects of knowledge representation.
More specifically CAOS addresses the difficult question of how key cognitive phenomena and concepts (and the involved terminology) can be found across language, psychology and reasoning and how this can be formally and ontologically understood, analysed and represented.
We welcome submissions on topics related to the ontology of hypothesised building blocks of cognition (such as image schemas, affordances, and related notions) and of cognitive capacities (such as concept invention, language acquisition), as well as system-demonstrations modelling these capacities in application settings.
We also welcome submissions addressing the cognitive and epistemological adequacy of ontological modelling.

We aim to address an interdisciplinary audience ranging from philosophy, computer science, logic, conceptual modelling, and knowledge representation, to cognitive science,

CREOL: Contextual Representation of Objects and Events in Language

Chairs: Valerio Basile, Tommaso Caselli, Daniele P. Radicioni, Andrea Amelio Ravelli

CREOL Website

Dealing with context is a key factor in the conceptualisation of human experience, and thus a major issue for artificial intelligence. It is well known that some properties of objects and events may be activated according to the context of occurrence, thus determining access to partial salient information rather than to all information. Events are complex entities by nature, and representing and extracting them from textual documents is not a trivial task. Existing resources encode very basic information on events: their linguistic realisation, roles of participants, and types.

Selecting a single representation for an event or object (along with its properties and qualities) requires handling contextual and typicality-based information. Ontologies and complementary knowledge representation devices (such as, e.g., default knowledge, typicality based knowledge) can be fruitfully combined to solve highly complex tasks, that are known to require vast amount of common sense knowledge (e.g., to individuate salient traits of objects or relevant participants in events).

DAO-SI: Data meets Applied Ontologies in Open Science and Innovation

Chairs: Alessandro Mosca, Roberto Confalonieri, Diego Calvanese

DAO-SI Website

The goal of the 2019 edition of DAO-SI is to provide opportunities for stakeholders from the academia, industry and public organisations to present their latest developments in ontology-mediated data integration, data access and analysis techniques, and data-driven applications, with a special focus on Science and Innovation (S&I) data management for decision and policy-making. Currently, key S&I data elements are dispersed across a multitude of distinct agencies and research institutions or are in third-party databases. They are often neither in structured format nor systematically shared across organisations, and the universe of data on publications, citations, and patents (among others) is typically maintained into closed-off silos. In such a context, ontology-mediated data management infrastructures can help bringing together inputs and outcomes from a variety of sources in an open and interoperable fashion. The workshop will be a great opportunity to synthesise new insights and disseminate knowledge across field boundaries to promote the interaction between the different stakeholders.

FOMI: 10th International Workshop on Formal Ontologies meet Industry

Chairs: Michael Gruninger, Walter Terkaj

FOMI Website

FOMI is an international forum where academic researchers and industrial practitioners meet to analyse and discuss application issues related to methods, theories, tools and applications based on formal ontologies. There is today wide agreement that knowledge modelling and the semantic dimension of information play an increasingly central role in networked economy: semantic-based applications aim to provide a framework for information and knowledge sharing, reliable information exchange, meaning negotiation and coordination between distinct organizations or among members of the same organization.

Theoretical ideas seem often very promising but their actual implementation brings up unexpected problems and issues. The FOMI 2019 Workshop aims to collect useful experiences and lessons learned by the presentation of:
- Experience with problems in ontology application;
- New insights on known problematic issues;
- New results;
- Successes and observations in ontology implementation;
- Lessons learned on the best way to apply ontological methodologies to real-world situations.

FOMI 2019 will facilitate open discussion and experience sharing. Very similar problems arise in disparate ontology applications and an open discussion helps to highlight commonalities and to spread ideas for possible solutions. For this reason, FOMI welcomes researchers and practitioners that embrace this perspective without restrictions on the domains they deal with: business, medicine, engineering, finance, law, biology, geography, electronics, etc.

FOUST III: Workshop on Foundational Ontology

Chairs: Antony Galton, Stefano Borgo, Oliver Kutz, Frank Loebe, Fabian Neuhaus

FOUST Website

Foundational ontologies are attempts to systematise those 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'. Amongst 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 this 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.

ODLS 2019: Ontologies and Data in Life Sciences 2019

Chairs: Martin Boeker, Ludger Jansen, Frank Loebe, Stefan Schulz

ODLS 2019 Website

Medicine, biology and life sciences produce hardly manageable and often incomprehensible amounts of data, information, and knowledge. Their computer-based retrieval, processing, integration, as well as their conceptual foundation, application, and reuse present ever new challenges to existing methods of knowledge representation, data bases, and data analysis and retrieval. Data management and data processing in the life sciences and in health care demand sophisticated methods and solutions for the integration and usage of distributed, heterogeneous data.

The workshops on Ontologies and Data in Life Sciences (ODLS), of which ODLS 2019 is the 9th instance, cover the overall spectrum of biomedical information management, ranging from experimental data acquisition and preprocessing across analysis, structuring and interpretation of data, up to developing structured representations of knowledge, in particular in the form of ontologies, with their various applications.

The primary aim of ODLS is an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas and results, fostering collaboration between ontologists, computer scientists, bio-informaticians, medical information scientists, physicians, biometricians, bio-chemists and philosophers, in academia and industry.

SHAPES 5.0: The Shape of Things

Chairs: Stefano Borgo, Inge Hinterwaldner, Oliver Kutz, Rossella Stufano Melone

SHAPES 5.0 Website

Shape, form, and structure are elusive notions and yet are at the core of several disciplines from the humanistic (like literature and the arts) to the scientific (chemistry, biology, physics) and within these from the formal (mathematics, logic) to the empirical (engineering, cognitive science). Even within domains such as computer science and artificial intelligence, these notions rely on common-sense meanings and everyday perception and communication practices. Several approaches have been proposed within the aforementioned disciplines to study and model the notions of shape, form and structure from different viewpoints. A comprehensive formal view of how to understand their different uses has not emerged yet but it is clear that one needs to investigate an interdisciplinary perspective.

The Shapes workshop series is an interdisciplinary event for the discussion of topics connected to shape (broadly understood). Perspectives from psycho-linguistics, ontology, computer science, artificial intelligence, mathematics, aesthetics, design science, cognitive science and beyond are welcome in terms of contribution and participation to the workshop. We seek to facilitate an interdisciplinary discussion between researchers from all disciplines interested in representing shape, form and structure, and reasoning about them.

SoLEE: Social, Legal and Economic Entities

Chairs: Ludger Jansen, Mathias Brochhausen, Nicola Guarino, Giancarlo Guizzardi, Daniele Porello

SoLEE Website

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. The workshop relates mainly to two previous events (SoLE-BD and Ontology of Economics 2018). We intend to broaden the focus in order to explore the emerging question how to deal with social entities in general, and to connect well established domains like biomedicine and business ontologies in this respect.

The workshop wants to collect approaches to deal with social, legal and economic entities in foundational and applied ontologies and discuss applications of these approaches to social, legal and economic entities in ontologies for biomedicine and business informatics. The workshop is intended to serve as a meeting point for stakeholders from applied ontology and the respective domain disciplines.

WINKS-2: Second Workshop on INteraction-based Knowledge Sharing

Chairs: Adrian Kemo, Jerome Euzenat, Dagmar Gromann, Ernesto Jimenez-Ruiz, Marco Schorlemmer, Valentina Tamma

WINKS-2 Website

This Second Workshop on INteraction-based Knowledge Sharing (WINKS-2) is aimed at researchers and practitioners investigating issues related to aspects of (autonomous) knowledge sharing, where the integration of knowledge is inherently interaction-based, irrespective of whether the interaction is machine to machine, or human to machine. Gradually expanding, distributed systems heighten the need of dynamic interactive knowledge-sharing processes and ever more sophisticated mechanisms are used to acquire and elicit knowledge. A paradigm shift has emerged that views knowledge creation, curation and evolution as a collaborative and interactive process between autonomous entities. As a highly interdisciplinary workshop, WINKS-2 invites submissions that address the fundamental issues and challenges posed by interaction-based approaches to knowledge sharing. At the same time, we are interested in submissions that provide solutions for allowing knowledge sharing interactively, with a particular focus on the processes, mechanisms and protocols underlying the proposed solution.

WODHSA: 1st International Workshop on Ontologies for Digital Humanities and their Social Analysis

Chairs: Marianna Nicolosi Asmundo, Roberta Ferrario, Emilio M. Sanfilippo

WODHSA Website

The International Workshop for Digital Humanities and their Social Analysis (WODHSA) gathers original research work about application and theoretical issues emerging in the elaboration of conceptual models, ontologies, and Semantic Web technologies for the Digital Humanities (DH). A plethora of heterogeneous and multi-format data - including 3D models, photos, audio records, and documents on paper - is currently available in the DH domain. Such huge amount of information retrieved from different and often isolated sources and contexts, disseminated in different places, asks for principled methodologies and technologies to semantically characterize and possibly integrate data and data models for analysis, visualization, retrieval, and other purposes. Moreover, dedicated automated reasoning tools allow to prove the consistency of data (models) and to extract implicit information thereby present to gain a deeper knowledge on the DH domain at stake. Hence, research efforts towards the application or use of reasoning engines is of vital relevance.

The WODHSA workshop also welcomes contributions that look at data, ontologies, and conceptual models for the DH from a broader philosophical or sociological perspective contextualizing them within the debate on digital technologies or models in philosophy or science and technology studies (STS). The contributions are expected to shed some light on the (social, economic, political, etc.) interests that drive the development and adoption of computer models in the DH and the impact on the involved stakeholders and society at large.

WOMoCoE : 4th International Workshop on Ontology Modularity, Contextuality, and Evolution

Chairs: Stefano Borgo, Loris Bozzato, Till Mossakowski, Antoine Zimmermann

WOMoCoE Website

In applying knowledge representation and reasoning techniques, knowledge is rarely taken as a single monolithic and static structure. Partitioning knowledge into distinct modular structures is central to organize, expand and amend knowledge bases. Also, understanding, representing and reasoning about context is essential for a correct use of knowledge modules and to correctly reason in changing situations. Finally, evolution of knowledge resources is an important factor influencing the quality and value of stored knowledge when new information is acquired.

Considering these needs, the 4th International Workshop on Ontology Modularity, Contextuality, and Evolution (WOMoCoE 2019) offers the opportunity to discuss current work on practical and theoretical aspects of modularity, contextuality and evolution of ontology based knowledge resources. The workshop aims to bring together an interdisciplinary audience interested in these topics to discuss both theoretical and formal aspect, and to investigate the variety of application perspectives.

In addition to workshops, JOWO will be hosting joint tutorials and keynotes, as well as meetings of IAOA Special Interest Groups and Technical Committees.


Contact:
JOWO 2019 Chairs: jowo2019@gmail.com
JOWO Steering Committee: jowo.steering@gmail.com