Having people from two sciences come together appears to be a di cult task, especially when one of the sciences has a tradition that can be counted in millennia and where the other one some decades ago simply did not exist. Todays talking about ontologies in informatics (computer science), for instance, can easily be misleading. The term is borrowed from philosophy where there is no such thing as a multitude of ontologies, there is only ontology as the subject of existence. The Fifth International Workshop on Philosophy and Informatics WSPI 2008 was organized by the Knowledge Management Department of the German Research Center for Arti cial Intelligence, the Department of Philosophy of University of Kaiserslautern and the Special Interest Group Philosophy and Informatics (SIG PandI) of the German Informatics Society (Arbeitskreis \Philosophie und Informatik" der Gesellschaft fur Informatik ). This group provides a platform for discussions in form of regular meetings and workshops. This combination brings together scientists from philosophy, informatics, and from related elds. It addresses and encourages especially|but not exclusively|the trans-disciplinary discourse on foundations of arti cial intelligence with the help of philosophy. A lot of topics have been discussed already, e.g., the relation between philosophical concepts of ontology and ontologies as a concept of knowledge representation. For further information about the goals and the progress of the SIG and the results of earlier workshops and work meetings, visit the SIG's website3. The main goal of this workshop series is to encourage interdisciplinary exchange on the philosophical foundations of informatics. They seek to bring together researchers from philosophy, informatics and neighboring disciplines in order to explore common points of interest and to intensify the exchange be3 http://www.philosophyandinformatics.org
tween the disciplines and a common vocabulary. The workshop also serves as the annual meeting platform of the members of the Special Interest Group on Philosophy and Informatics. The 2008 Workshop had a special focus on the area of conceptualization and representation in both computer science and philosophy. 1
It seems clear that scientists of both areas can enter into fruitful discussions. For centuries philosophy has been a seed of ideas used to fertilize other disciplines, such as mathematics or physics.
During the last years it became clear that knowledge conceptualization and representation have crucial in uence on accessibility of information both in research and business activities. However, the multidisciplinarity of the approaches and the complexity of the notion of knowledge raise many issues, which are often simply ignored or treated o handedly. Computer scientists are very much involved in system and application modeling while using concepts implicitly or only vaguely grasping them. There are assumptions made or to be made in order to have a coherent view on the subject. Also there is the danger, that the notion of terms like \ontology" or \semantics" are misused. They become a mere marketing label and one looses track from the ambitious goal.
On the other hand, for millennia, Ontology as a discipline of philosophy|as the mother of sciences|addressed the notion of the conceptualization of our view of the world. Philosophy is about concepts and clarifying them to the maximum extent, sometimes not bothering about possible applications of the generated knowledge. What, then, seems better than systematically examining the potential of contributions of philosophy to the formalization of world knowledge for mutual promotion and synergy? The philosophical notion of ontology, which gained considerable impact in the information sciences, was an analogous success story.
In this environment the workshop's discussions centered around the topics of conceptualization as a common eld of research in philosophy and informatics, ontologies and ontology, knowledge and context, personalization of knowledge/embodied mind, epistemological framework, and philosophy of information. These topics are addressed in one or more of the presented papers.
Luciano Floridi (invited talk): Understanding the Informational Turn: the Fourth Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Francis Rousseaux, Alain Bonardi, Benjamin Roadley: ReCollection: a Disposal/ Formal Requirement-Based Tool to Support Sustainable Collection Making . . 7 Heidrun Allert, Christoph Richter: Practices, Systems, and Context Working as Core Concepts in Modeling Socio-Technical Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic: Semantics of Information as Interactive Computation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Klaus Wiegerling: Cultural Speci cation and Culturalization { An exposition of two basic problems regarding the development of ontologies in computer science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Andreas Gutscher, Jessica Heesen, Oliver Siemoneit: Possibilities and Limitations of Modeling Trust and Reputation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Vincent C. Muller: Symbol Grounding in Computational Systems: A Paradox of Intentions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
Many persons are needed for the success of a workshop. We thank the contributors, the program committee, and the supporters at DFKI, Kaiserslautern.
Norbert Jastroch (MET Communications GmbH, Bad Homburg, Germany) Christophe Roche (University of Savoie, France) Francis Rousseaux (IRCAM, Paris, France) Stefan Schulz (The e-Spirit Company GmbH, Germany) Barry Smith (IFOMIS, Saarbrucken, Germany) Boris Wyssusek (Queensland University of Technology, Australia) Wolfgang Lenski (University of Kaiserslautern, Germany) Gerhard Heyer (University of Leipzig, Germany) Bertin Klein (DFKI, Germany) John D. Haynes (School of Information Technology, Charles Darwin University, Australia)