These proceedings present the papers and extended abstracts that took part in the Joint Ontology WOrkshops (JOWO'23): Episode IX: The Quebec Summer of Ontology.
Yearly organised, JOWO is one of the main events of the research mission of the International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA). Taking the form of an umbrella conference, each year JOWO hosts a series of workshops and tutorials that, together, address a wide spectrum of topics related to theoretical and applied ontology research. Traditional domains include areas in the full span of cognitive science and humanities, knowledge representation and conceptual modelling, artificial intelligence and robotics, logic and philosophy, and linguistics and natural language processing. With such an interdisciplinary outlook, the purpose of JOWO is to provide a platform for the diverse communities interested in building, reasoning with, and applying formalised ontologies.
Running since 2015, each edition of JOWO has its own character with a different set of workshops and tutorials-depending on the selection made by the yearly organisational team and reflecting the respective local research communities and global research trends. As an umbrella event covering all angles of the IAOA community, and since 2020 running yearly in conjunction with the IAOA flagship conference FOIS 'Formal Ontology in Information Systems', the Joint Ontology Workshops JOWO continue to grow in importance and influence.
The core goal of 'CAOS: Cognition And OntologieS' is to create synergies between cognitive sciences and research on formal ontologies. With this in mind, the primary focus of the workshop series lies in the formal modelling and representation of important cognitive phenomena and concepts, encompassing notions from research on language, reasoning, and behaviour. The event attracts an interdisciplinary audience from diverse fields, such as philosophy, linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, computer science, and other related disciplines. The ultimate objective of CAOS is twofold. First, to encourage innovative research exploring the convergence of the cognitive sciences with formal ontologies. Second, to provide a platform for discussing unconventional scientific topics in a welcoming environment. By fostering international collaborations and promoting free-wheeling conversations, CAOS aims to significantly contribute to the advancement of cutting-edge research.
We are delighted to announce that the seventh edition of CAOS received papers covering a wide range of topics, contributed by both experienced researchers and students from different domains. In this edition, we accepted seven papers for publication in this volume. Related to the domain of knowledge representation and graph data structures, Michael DeBellis proposed modelling of the mind as a representation of Cognitive modules in OWL (Web Ontology Language) with a functional perspective. By extending an approach used in the context of relational databases, Jens Koetters, Peter Eklund and Stefan Schmidt apply relational scaling to RDFS ontologies, advancing methodologies developed in the framework of Formal Concept Analysis. Fumiaki Toyoshima and Adrien Barton moved the first steps towards a foundation for a realist ontology representing mental phenomena, leveraging Williams's three-layered naturalistic metaphysics of representation. Hermann Bense proposed Cascaded Role Sets (CRS) as a new method to enable the representation of complex ontological structures and a novel strategy for defining Ontology Design Patterns. More linguistic-centred research is proposed by Laura Spillner, Robert Porzel, Robin Nolte and Rainer Malaka, who presented a work representing word embedding vectors as 2D images to individuate the mereotopology of semantic information. Jamie Macbeth, Mackie Zhou and Zoie Zhao investigated the human sensorimotor perception, analysing the decomposition of relationships in spatial orientation and by proposing novel conceptual primitives. Finally, Gabriele Sacco, Loris Bozzato and Oliver Kutz investigated exceptionality, gradability, and content sensitivity by studying the role of generics, and the formal desiderata to address them, in defeasible reasoning and Description Logic. This workshop was motivated by the tremendous growth in recent years of geospatial information, primarily published online as GIS data, geospatial linked data, or other semantically enriched data. The availability and volume of such data suggested opportunities to re-evaluate the current ecosystem of geospatial types and relations in ontologies, vocabularies and data schemas. These range from specialized geospatial data standards, such as OGC's Simple Features or Geosparql, to domain-specific ontologies or spatially-heavy knowledge graphs, such as those for the geosciences, transportation, planning, environmental sciences, architecture, manufactured products, to the spatial components of top-level ontologies.
Through presentations and a panel discussion, this workshop explored the current state of geospatial ontologies and knowledge graphs, as well as potential future directions. In particular, discussion during presentations and the panel session endeavoured to identify gaps and priorities for the next generation of geospatial ontologies. In addition, the needs of current and potential users, applications, and standards were considered, as well as current big trends such as geographicallyaware Artificial Intelligence. A general conclusion saw the need for greater integration between ontology-driven and machine-learning-driven applications.
The Integrated Food Ontology Workshop Programme Committee The OSS workshop fosters communication and strengthens interdisciplinary work at the intersection of semantic technologies, society, and services. It invites researchers from the Knowledge Representation, Semantic Web, and Machine Learning communities to submit theoretical contributions, novel algorithms, artifacts, and tools related to the interaction of society and service provisioning. We welcome reports from sociologists and service practitioners across various societyfocused domains (e.g. social workers, therapists, physicians, probation officers, urban planners, etc.) on their experiences using semantic-enabled technologies, best practices, and insights.
The second OSS workshop explored the topic of domain ontologies, with several researchers presenting their works. Daniela Rosu focused on the inconsistent and incompatible definitions in social services, proposing an ontology that simplifies the representation of goals, needs, and outcomes. John Beverly shared updates on the Occupation Ontology (OccO), explaining their strategy for integrating codes from various sources and encouraging further community participation. Michael DeBellis introduced the DaanMatch project, designed to assist NGOs in meeting administrative requirements through advanced technology and using ontology and knowledge graph technology to model various related elements. In the application ontologies section, Giampaolo Bella et al proposed an ontological approach for cybersecurity compliance checks against textual documents, such as the European GDPR Regulation and the NIS Directive. Samer Sharani showcased an ontology of refugees' home return, with the aim of equipping policymakers with knowledge tools to improve their programs, plans, and evaluations. Following presentations, participants engaged in a lively discussion about the many open questions about the development and application of ontologies in the realm of social services, governmental services, and their usage within society. Despite their wide acceptance and deployment, ontologies face unique challenges that arise from their inherent complexity, the dynamic nature of service industries, and societal changes. Also, while service-related ontologies hold significant potential to improve data management, decision-making, and service delivery, their adoption by organizations and service providers faces numerous technical and cultural difficulties. Specific challenges explored included ontology engineering and design patterns; choice of upper, domain, and application ontologies; ontological representation of services and communities (citizens, populations, individuals, etc.); and the complex nature of social service phenomena. Additional topics of discussion for implementing and working with ontologies included semantic interoperability, standardization, ontology integration, and the scalability of ontology-based systems.
At the end of the discussion, we identified possible solutions and best practices for ontology implementation in services that benefit society, emphasizing the need for multi-disciplinary collaboration and a focus on sustainability.
Artificial Intelligence (AI), Knowledge Modeling (KM), Information Extraction (IE) and Process Mining (PM) methods are becoming increasingly relevant to numerous sub-domains of legal informatics. These areas include ontologies, argumentation, natural language processing, legal event log analysis, all which can be paired with a multilingual approach. The Knowledge Management and Process Mining for Law (KM4Law) workshop serves as a forum to discuss these and other related topics.
The swift advancement of AI in recent years has brought us closer to solving long-standing challenges in AI & Law. This progress makes it all the more im-portant to identify the limits of automated systems, especially when faced with the remaining unsolved intentional and unintentional ambiguities and conflicts that demand legal interpretation. This workshop aims to shed light on these issues, exploring the yet unfaced opportunities and challenges that AI presents for knowledge representation in the legal domain.
The goals of our workshop range widely, covering the classification of legal sources, legal design, and legal ontologies. Also included are legal decisions similarity and clustering, prediction and support during judicial decision making, and legal interpretation support. Further topics encompass indentifying the evolution of legal concepts and definitions over time, information extraction and classification, process mining for legal compliance, and the detection of linguistic phenomena and patterns in legal sources. We also focus on multilingual alignments of concepts, both domestic and international, and the identification of legal references and network analysis.
In particular, the second edition of the international workshop KM4LAW featured a keynote about hybrid AI for legal domain by Monica Palmirani. Six papers were presented at the workshop, covering diverse topics such as knowledge-based service architecture for legal document building by Sergio Picascia et al. The Modular Knowledge workshop offers an interdisciplinary venue for discussing and developing solutions for modularity of knowledge: the dramatic increase in the amount of open and linked data and the increasing semantification of such data make clear that knowledge is not monolithic, static or uniform, and that there is a need of methods and tools for dealing with heterogeneous and distributed knowledge as a constellation of modules.
The Modular Knowledge workshop combines the efforts of previous events (like WoMO, ARCOE-Logic and WOMoCoE workshops) into an interdisciplinary venue for discussing and developing solutions for modularity of knowledge.
The workshop aims to cover and establish connections between various approaches (ranging from rich semantic representations, like Knowledge Graphs and formal ontology, to simpler schemas, like RDF and database schemas) for representing knowledge, its context, its evolution, and for making it accessible to automatic reasoning and knowledge management tasks. The workshop spans approaches that make use of logic-based, sub-symbolic, or numerical representations.
FOUST VII Foundational ontology is about categories of reality or thought 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'. There are several foundational ontologies that provide a systematic formal representation of these categories, their relationships, and interdependencies. 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 main use of foundational ontologies is as a starting point for the development of domain ontologies and application ontologies. A foundational ontology provides an ontology engineer with a conceptual framework that enables her to analyse a given domain, identify the entities in the domain as specialisations of the generic categories in the foundational ontology, and often reuse relationships (e.g., parthood) from the foundational ontology. The utilisation of foundational ontologies for the development of domain and application ontologies has two main benefits. Firstly, the ontology engineer can reuse an existing set of well-studied ontological distinctions and design principles instead of having to develop an ad-hoc solution.
Secondly, if two domain ontologies are based on the same foundational ontology, it is easier to integrate them.
FOUST is an ontology workshop series that offers researchers in foundational ontology an opportunity to present their results. This includes work on specific areas of foundational ontology as well as work on a particular foundational ontology. The seventh edition of FOUST (FOUST VII) accepted eight papers for presentation and they are included in the present volume.
publications, with an application to knowledge in cellulose materials; the use of ontologies for robots, both for spatial and uncertain reasoning; conceptual foundation of sustainability for AI ethics; development of ontology-based GIS for supporting forest resource management; the use of generics to model exceptions in Description Logic; and the role of ontologies in automated reasoning to answer geospatial queries. We express our deepest gratitude to all participants, mentors, and attendees for making ECS an essential component of the FOIS conference.
Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy Stefano Borgo Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR, Italy Oliver Kutz Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy Fumiaki Toyoshima Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse, CNRS, France Programme Committee Bahar Aameri University of Toronto, Canada João Paulo A. Almeida Federal University of Espírito Santo, Brazil Adrien Barton Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse, CNRS, France John Bateman University of Bremen, Germany Luca Biccheri Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR, Italy Boyan Brodaric Geological Survey of Canada, Canada Claudio Calosi University of Geneva, Switzerland Massimiliano Carrara University of Padova, Italy Roberta Ferrario Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR, Italy Claudenir M. Fonseca University of Twente, The Netherlands Mattia Fumagalli Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy Pawel Garbacz John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland Pierdaniele Giaretta University of Padova, Italy Pierre Grenon The National Center for Ontological Research, USA Michael Grüninger University of Toronto, Canada Nicola Guarino Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR, Italy Giancarlo Guizzardi University of Twente, The Netherlands Heinrich Herre University of Leipzig, Germany Ludger Jansen PTH Brixen, Italy Gilles Kassel University of Picardie, France Kathrin Koslicki Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland Frank Loebe University of Leipzig, Germany Jim Logan No Magic, Inc, USA Claudio Masolo Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR, Italy Olivier Massin Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland Riichiro Mizoguchi Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Japan Friederike Moltmann Bases, Corpus, Language, Université Côte d'Azur, France Fabian Neuhaus Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Germany Ítalo José Da Silva Oliveira Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy J. Neil Otte Johns Hopkins University, USA Daniele Porello University of Genova, Italy Guendalina Righetti Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy Elena Romanenko Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy Tiago Princes Sales University of Twente, The Netherlands Emilio M. Sanfilippo Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR, Italy Barry Smith University at Buffalo, USA Markus Stumptner University of South Australia, Australia Giuliano Torrengo University of Milan, Italy Nicolas Troquard Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy Laure Vieu Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse, CNRS, France
Programme Committee Kolawole Adebayo Dublin City University, Ireland / ADAPT Centre, Ireland Valerio Basile University of Turin, Italy Valerio Bellandi University of Milan, Italy Guido Boella University of Turin, Italy Chiara Di Francescomarino University of Trento, Italy Beatriz Esteves Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain Marcelo Fantinato University of São Paulo, Brazil Daniele Licari Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Italy Rohan Nanda University of Maastricht, Netherlands María Navas Loro Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain Italo Jose Da Silva Oliveira Free University, Bozen-Bolzano Monica Palmirani University of Bologna, Italy Matteo Palmonari Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca Harshvardhan J. Pandit Trinity College, Dublin Sergio Picascia University of Milan, Italy Davide Riva University of Milan, Italy Livio Robaldo Swansea University, Wales Víctor Rodríguez-Doncel Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain Elena Romanenko University of Bozen Massimiliano Ronzani FBK, Trento, Italy Salvatore Sapienza University of Bologna, Italy Galileo Sartor University of Bologna, Italy Giovanni Siragusa University of Turin, Italy Andrea Tagarelli University of Calabria, Italy
The Early Career Symposium (ECS) is an integral part of the FOIS conference, created with the specific aim of providing students and early career researchers with a stage to present their work and receive feedback and insights from experienced researchers.
In the spirit of cultivating young talent and fostering knowledge exchange, this year's participants in the ECS had the chance to showcase their research through both short oral presentations in front of the FOIS audience and engaging poster presentations.
On the first day of the conference, each participant could engage in an extended conversation with a senior mentor in their respective fields during a dedicated mentoring lunch. This interaction serves as a bridge between generations of researchers, facilitating guidance, wisdom, and knowledge transfer from experienced hands to those just starting their academic journey, and, in turn, contributes to the collective advancement of knowledge by allowing young researchers to provide innovative ideas. The ECS is not just about formal presentations and structured mentoring but also offers a venue to build informal networks and relationships. The demonstration track complements FOIS 2023 main tracks by offering an interactive platform for authors to present and discuss their work. It invites demonstrations of methods and tools developed using ontologies, as well as those to create, maintain, integrate, publish, evaluate, and implement ontologies. It also welcomes demonstrations of novel ontology (anti)patterns and of challenges arising in the ontology engineering life cycle.
This year, five papers were accepted in the demonstration track. One was presented during the on-site part of FOIS and the remainder in the online part.
The papers discussed tools for education, reasoning systems, and application of knowledge graphs. As the Applied Ontology community, we have reached the point where an impressive variety of ontologies have been developed across a wide range of domains. For the most part, however, there has been a lack of coordination among these efforts and even a lack of awareness about the work that is being done by groups within the community. The Ontology Showcase at FOIS 2023 facilitates the sharing and reuse of ontologies, with the goal of achieving the vision of seamless semantic interoperability of curated ontologies within their applications.
This year, eight ontologies were accepted for presentation. Three were presented during the on-site part of FOIS. The other five were presented in the online part.
The ontologies described a wide range of domains, including record management, privacy, cognitive theories, and expertise.