These proceedings present the papers and extended abstracts that took part in the 2025 Joint Ontology Workshops (JOWO): Episode XI: The Sicilian Summer under the Etna.
JOWO is the main venue of the International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA) for workshops on formal and applied ontology. The mission of JOWO is to facilitate collaboration among diverse communities interested in building, reasoning with, and applying formal ontologies in information sciences, artificial intelligence theory and applications, philosophy and cognitive science, and beyond.
Since 2013, the event has been held alongside the IAOA’s flagship conference Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS). Since 2015, each edition of JOWO has its own character, with a diferent set of workshops selected by the annual organizing team that reflects the respective local research communities and global research trends.
JOWO XI was hosted by the University of Catania, Italy, on 8-9 September 2025. It ofered 15 workshops that spanned a broad spectrum of formal ontology research, addressing both foundational aspects and applications in diverse areas: • CAOS9 - 9th Workshop on Cognition And OntologieS • EIKE - Workshop on Explicit and Implicit Knowledge Extraction • FOMI - 14th International Workshop on Formal Ontologies Meet Industry • FOUST IX - 9th Workshop on Foundational Ontology • IFOW 2025 - 6th Integrated Food Ontology Workshop • ISD9 - The Ninth Image Schema Day • KM4LAW - 4th International Workshop on Knowledge Management and process mining for Law • ONTOLLM 2025 - 2nd Workshop on Convergence of Large-Language Models and Ontologies • OSS - 3rd Workshop on Ontologies for Services and Social-good • PHASES 2025 - Workshop on Promoting Healthy Aging through the Semantic Enrichment of
Social Science • PLATO - Planning and Ontology Workshop • POWERs - Perspectival Ontology Workshop on Entities that can be Realized (POWERs) • PwM2 - 2nd Playing with Meanings workshop • Shields 2 - 2nd International Workshop on Modeling for Cybersecurity • SWODCH 2025 - 5th International Workshop on Semantic Web and Ontology Design for Cultural
Heritage
Fumiaki Toyoshima and Ludger Jansen are the recipients of the "Best of JOWO 2025” award for their submission "Malfunctioning Artifacts: A Step Towards a Realizable-Centered Unifying Account”. Accepted to FOUST IX, in this work the authors persuasively argue that malfunctioning artifacts are best understood in terms of intentional realizable entities that fail to be realized.
We would like to thank all authors and speakers for their contributions, and the workshop organizers and programme committee members for making JOWO happen. We would also like to extend our gratitude to the local organizers at the University of Catania as well as International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA).
Proceedings of the Joint Ontology Workshops (JOWO) - Episode XI: The Sicilian Summer under the Etna, co-located with the 15th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2025), September 8–9, 2025, Catania, Italy © 2025 Copyright © 2025 for the individual papers by the papers’ authors. Copyright © 2025 for the volume as a collection by its editors. This volume and its papers are published under the Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
University of Bufalo, USA Linköping University, Sweden
Sharda University, Greater Noida, India Meaningfy SARL, Luxembourg and Stellenbosch University, South Africa Sharda University, Greater Noida, India
9th Workshop on Cognition And OntologieS
Guendalina Righetti Stefano De Giorgis Gabriele Sacco
Programme chairs University of Oslo, Norway Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
Free University of Bozen-Bolzano and Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy Greta Adamo Loris Bozzato Tiziano Dalmonte Beatrice Fiumanò Bart Gajderowicz Anton Gnatenko Michael Gruninger Gabriele Kern-Isberner Nicolas Lazzari Mena Leemhuis Anna Sofia Lippolis Claudio Masolo Balázs Mosolygó Daniele Porello Emilio M. Sanfilippo Kai Sauerwald Marco Schorlemmer He Tan Nikolaos Tsiogkas Marta Maria Vilardo Francesco Antonio Zaccarini
Programme committee
Universitat Politècnica de València Università dell’Insubria Free University of Bozen-Bolzano University of Bologna University of Toronto Free University of Bozen-Bolzano University of Toronto Technische Universität Dortmund University of Bologna & University of Pisa Free University of Bozen-Bolzano ISTC-CNR Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR, Trento University of Bergen University of Genova ISTC-CNR Laboratory for Applied Ontology University of Hagen Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA), CSIC Jönköping University KU Leuven University of Catania
University of Bologna
The core goal of CAOS: Cognition And OntologieS is to investigate the fundamental cognitive phenomena and concepts across language, psychology, and reasoning, examining how these can be formally and ontologically analysed with the purpose to model, simulate and represent cognitive phenomena for artificial intelligence in the context of both traditional symbolic AI and contemporary neural approaches.
Currently the artificial intelligence community’s discourse appears to be bifurcated: one aspect focuses on the reconceptualization of “intelligence,” while another emphasizes a functional approach wherein embodied cognition, cognitive computing, and the intersection of symbolic and neuro-symbolic methodologies with cognitive sciences have become crucial considerations.
CAOS interdisciplinary nature makes it the perfect environment to bridge the gap between knowledge representation, cognitive sciences, neural approaches, and formal ontology. It provides a platform for researchers in either domain to discuss and present their work.
The ninth edition of CAOS received papers covering a wide range of topics, contributed by experienced researchers and students from diferent domains.
In this edition, we accepted nine papers for publication in this volume, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of the workshop. The contributions space from the insightful “An Argumentation for Embodied Plant Cognition with Parallels from Animal Cognition” by Maria M. Hedblom, which investigates the very nature of “cognition,” and argues for a plausible extension of the cognition attribution beyond humans and animals to include plants; to “Large Language Models as a Tool for Mining Object Knowledge” by Hannah An and Lenhart Schuber, which explores the use of Large Language Models to extract common-sense knowledge about artifacts composition.
Other works proposes ontologies for various domains: “Representing the Conceptual Design Process in Engineering using IAO and OBI” by Dilek Yargan and Ludger Jansen introduces an ontology for the conceptual design phase of the product development process in engineering, which conforms to the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry and aligns to the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO); “Towards a Semantic Representation of Memory Entities” by Soline Felice, Cassia Trojahn, and Frank Arnould proposes an ontology of memory with the aim of disambiguating the key concepts used in diferent disciplines and theories about memory; “Beyond Copies: Digital Twins as Information Artefacts” by Luca Biccheri and Roberta Ferrario proposes an ontological understanding of Digital Twins as informational artefacts, rather than as copies of physical entities or systems as they are commonly interpreted; finally, “Shadows to Referents” by John Bittner, John Beverley and Timothy Coleman discusses an ontology of anomaly resolution aligned with the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and Common Core Ontologies (CCO), inspired by Plato’s Cave.
A diferent take on a similar topic is that of “Non-Monotonic Generalisation of an Ontology” by Gabriele Sacco, Loris Bozzato, Michael Gruninger and Oliver Kutz, where the issue is how to generalise an ontology allowing exceptions to the axioms used, therefore without necessarily requiring a resolution. Addressing more directly the topic of the relationship between models of reality and reality itself is the paper “Coordination, Semantics and Ontologies” by Francesco Antonio Zaccarini and Claudio Masolo, which discusses the foundation of coordination among diferent agents in the case of opacity towards the real state of the world.
Finally, on the methodology of applied ontology, the paper “Characterising Competency Questions for Ontologies” by C. Maria Keet and Zubeida Khan contributes to the theoretical foundation of Competency Questions for ontologies by proposing a conceptual model of competency questions, aimed at improving the clarity of “Conceptual Questions” and, consequently, their efectiveness in ontology design.
Workshop on Explicit and Implicit Knowledge Extraction
University of Catania, Italy University of Catania, Italy University of Catania, Italy
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
Misael Mongiovì University of Catania, Italy
Aldo Gangemi University of Bologna, Italy
Extracting nuanced and context-sensitive information (i.e., the subtle, often implicit data embedded in text, images, and multimodal signals) is a key challenge in advancing Knowedge Extraction (KE) for Entity Linking (EL), Information Retrieval (IR), and any sense-making application. While efective for explicit knowledge extraction, traditional pipelines often struggle to capture more complex elements, such as emotional undertones, sociocultural themes, or context-dependent subtleties. Recent advancements in machine learning, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), show promise for directly inferring enriched semantic graphs that bridge this gap. The first edition of EIKE - Explicit and Implicit Knowledge Extraction - ofers an opportunity to discuss breakthrough techniques, including neuro-symbolic systems, deep learning models, and ontology-based methods to address those challenges. By focusing on the direct extraction and representation of knowledge, the workshop aims to advance the state-of-the-art in semantically rich and context-aware knowledge systems.
The Explicit and Implicit Knowledge Extraction (EIKE) workshop aims to promote discussion on breakthrough techniques, including neuro-symbolic systems, deep learning models, and ontology-based methods to address those challenges.
The papers accepted at EIKE address both applied methodologies for ontology population through knowledge extraction and theoretical approaches to metaphor understanding in computational systems. Cappa et al. introduce a stratified framework for metaphor understanding in computational systems, structured across three layers. Their approach represents metaphorical meaning in a context-sensitive and pragmatically grounded manner, integrating insights from Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Speech Act Theory. The proposed tripartite model aims to overcome limitations of current computational methods, which often fail to adequately capture contextual nuance and the complexity of metaphorical meaning. The three layers consist of: content analysis, which represents basic conceptual elements and associated metadata; conceptual combination, which fuses source and target concepts to generate emergent meanings; and pragmatic intentionality, which analyzes speaker intent, communicative function, and contextual efects. By integrating these dimensions, the framework aspires to advance computational metaphor understanding, making it more closely aligned with the way humans interpret deep and contextually grounded meanings.
The contributions illustrate the role of ontologies and computational models in mediating between formal knowledge representation and the inherent complexity of human language and meaning. By confronting both the practical challenges of managing uncertainty in decision-support systems and the theoretical intricacies of metaphor interpretation, the works presented at EIKE underscore the workshop’s contribution to advancing interdisciplinary research towards more explainable, contextsensitive, and semantically grounded AI.
14th International Workshop on Formal Ontologies Meet Industry
University of Twente, The Netherlands
National Research Council of Italy (CNR), Italy
The 14th edition of the International Workshop on Formal Ontologies Meet Industry (FOMI) continues its tradition of fostering dialogue between researchers in formal ontology and practitioners from industry, engineering, and applied sciences. FOMI provides a unique forum for discussing how ontological methods can support industrial innovation, improve information integration, and enhance decisionmaking processes across complex domains. In addition, the workshop welcomes discussions on tool support, standards, and collaborations between academia and industry. Since its inception, FOMI has aimed to bridge the gap between foundational ontology research and the operational needs of industrial systems. In recent years, this dialogue has become increasingly relevant, with the growth of AI-driven systems, knowledge graphs, semantic interoperability, and digital twins, all requiring robust ontological frameworks to ensure reliability, transparency, and scalability.
FOMI 2025 brings together contributions that address the application of formal ontologies to industrial use cases, methodological and modeling challenges, and successful case studies that highlight the impact of ontological analysis in real-world settings. The accepted contributions at FOMI 2025, six in total, tackle heterogeneous topics. Two works address challenges in the aerospace and manufacturing industries, including cross-domain system design in aircraft manufacturing (Liu et al.) and the validation of simulation models for manufacturing systems (Benavent Nácher et al.). The assembly and design process is also explored through the automatic generation of precedence matrices from CAD files (Jaberi et al.). In the materials domain, Sunada et al. propose an ontology-based system to support the selection of analytical methods for inorganic material analysis. The cybersecurity domain is tackled by Amalfitano et al., who present an ontology framework for integrating heterogeneous sources of vulnerability data. A more institutional and environmental focus is found in the work of Schweikert and Hahmann, who develop an ontology design pattern linking facilities to industry classifications for spatial and economic analysis. Across these applications, several foundational ontologies are adopted or extended, including BFO (Liu et al.), DOLCE (Benavent Nácher et al.), and ontology design patterns for conceptual integration and reasoning (Schweikert and Hahmann; Jaberi et al.).
9th Workshop on Foundational Ontology
Adrien Barton CNRS, IRIT (Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse), France Mattia Fumagalli Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy Oliver Kutz Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
Stefano Borgo Massimiliano Carrara Roberta Ferrario Salvatore Florio Antony Galton Ludger Jansen Gilles Kassel Øystein Linnebo Fabian Neuhaus Ítalo Oliveira Fabrício Henrique Rodrigues
Italian National Research Council, CNR-ISTC CNR-ISTC University of Padua CNR-ISTC University of Oslo University of Exeter University of Rostock University of Picardie Jules Verne University of Oslo University of Magdeburg University of Twente Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) Samsung R&D Insitute Brazil (SRBR) Gran Sasso Science Institute UT2J & IRIT University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland
Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse
We are pleased to contribute to the JOWO 2025 Episode XI program with the 9th edition of the FOUST workshop. The mission of JOWO is to facilitate collaboration among diverse communities interested in building, reasoning with, and applying formal ontologies in information sciences. FOUST complements this mission by ofering a dedicated forum for researchers to discuss and explore the foundational aspects of applied ontology. This encompasses discussing philosophical foundations, presenting new research on specific foundational ontologies, discussing existing foundational ontologies, comparing them, and examining their relevance to the broader ontological enterprise.
The papers accepted to FOUST IX present a wide spectrum of investigations into foundational ontology, ranging from abstract philosophical issues to concrete implementation strategies.
Brandon Bennett proposes a definitional methodology for ontology construction that begins from the most basic primitives of space, time, and matter, and incrementally extends towards mid-level vocabularies. In this approach, definitions themselves are suficient to guarantee semantic constraints, eliminating the need for extra axioms when new terms are introduced. He introduced a primitive concept of “matter” as both a reference frame enriching a spatial ontology and as a representation of the actual material substance. Extending the theme of spatial foundations, Lucas Vieira, Cauã Antunes, Mara Abel, Fabricio Rodrigues, and Lisa Stright address the lack of a theory of spatial location in the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO). They propose treating spatial location as an intrinsic moment of objects, coupled with a taxonomy of spatial relations inspired by the Region Connection Calculus. Their framework provides UFO with a more robust means of modelling spatial relations in real-world domains.
Other contributions consider the role of logic and structural modeling in ontology. Fumiaki Toyoshima and Satoru Niki revisit the notions of subsumption and inclusion, showing that their meaning depends on the logical framework in which they are formulated. By comparing classical and paraconsistent logics, they demonstrate that choices of representation language can shape, and sometimes even determine, ontological commitments. Laure Vieu and Adrien Barton, by contrast, focus on informational entities such as texts. They extend the mereology of slots with an order relation, allowing for the modeling of linear structures, and discuss conditions under which informational entities can be identified as identical. Fumiaki Toyoshima and Ludger Jansen ofer a realizable-centered account of malfunctioning artifacts, arguing that an artifact malfunctions when an intentional realizable entity fails to be realized.
Moreover, two contributions turn to the design and implementation of upper-level ontologies. Ian Bailey and collaborators analyze the alignment of the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) with the Information Exchange Standard (IES), illustrating how key design patterns and content structures can be connected across the two frameworks. Michel Dumontier and colleagues present the Simplified Upper-Level Ontology (SULO), designed as a lightweight framework that lowers the barrier for adoption by domain experts in biomedicine while maintaining suficient expressive power.
Finally, two works were included in the FOUST program for presentation only. Riccardo Baratella revisits the Personite Problem, a challenge to perdurantism, the view that persons are four-dimensional entities with temporal parts. Tavi Truman and John Bittner address a fundamental technical issue: BFO’s relations are inherently n-ary, yet dominant data frameworks rely on binary structures such as RDF.
Taken together, the contributions to FOUST 2025 highlight the richness of contemporary foundational ontology. They range from metaphysical inquiries into matter, space, and persistence, through logical and structural tools for handling information and artifacts, to innovative frameworks that make upperlevel ontologies both rigorous and usable in real-world contexts.
We extend our sincere appreciation to all members of the program committee for their diligent and thoughtful reviews. We are also grateful to all the authors who submitted their work, both those selected and those not, for their valuable contributions. We hope that this collection serves as a valuable resource and a source of inspiration for ongoing and future research in both information systems engineering and metaphysics.
IFOW 2025 6th Integrated Food Ontology Workshop
Simon Fraser University, Canada
Ido Toxopeus Larisa Soldatova Duccio Cavalieri Laurette Dube Miezah Ebenezer Kwofie Andrea Borghini Renata Guizzardi-Silva Souza
Universitaet Bremen Glengarry Agriculture and Forestry Simon Fraser University RIVM RIVM Goldsmiths University of London Università degli Studi di Firenze McGill University McGill University UMIL/Culinary Mind
University of Twente
The 6th annual Integrated Food Ontology Workshop (IFOW) is pleased to be a part of the JOWO 2025 Episode XI program in conjunction with FOIS at the University of Catania. We gather to discuss philosophical, applied ontology and sociotechnical aspects of food systems which altogether promise a more stable, permanent open-source vocabulary which can evolve incrementally to describe food system behaviour as it spans from ecosystem and anthropogenic source, to individual and populationlevel nutritional and socioeconomic import. Philosophical discussion of food semantics helps to arrive at a consensus model/language of food materials, roles, dispositions, functions, and processes – a middle/upper-level ontology that we can all agree upon. A technical / applied ontology perspective brings structure and tools for vocabulary curation, quality control, lookup, and reuse, as well as application focus on food related biosample collection, plant or animal breeding, robotics, industrial automation, etc. A sociotechnical view wraps all of this work into a broader interdisciplinary “lingua franca of data science” efort to blend tangential domains of knowledge – from life science, animal and plant rearing, industrial and distribution infrastructure, food traceability, and regulatory management towards public and environmental health and security. Our time of rapid change demands narratives that identify, anticipate and explain courses of action to alleviate hunger, food insecurity, environmental degradation and climate change, narratives that rely on ontologies to salvage learning by enabling precise integration and comparison of past and present food system research and production data.
The nine paper and presentation abstracts accepted at this years workshop can be broadly categorized into four workshop topics: food system sustainability, traceability, food waste and food ontology development. Giorgio Ubbiali et al. discuss meat production from a general evaluation framework for sustainability ontologies; Sander van Leeuwen et al. investigate rule patterns for describing food risk assessment; Bart Gajderowicz et al. present an ontology framework for detailing food system production and distribution steps and related sustainability and other indicators; Magalie Weber et al. cover an ontology to describe food consumer behavior; Fumiaki Toyoshima et al. explore food waste as a role based on food material or food product roles. Katherine Thornton et al. describe the challenges of harvesting nutritional information from past optically scanned publications; Jenny Johana Gallo Franco et al. dive into the challenges and Wikidata integrated solutions for detailing current food sample metadata relevant to nutritional content; Anoosha Sehar et al. detail the plant, animal, and fungi anatomical and taxonomic template structure that enables a food ontology to be a foundational resource for food composition description, and Damion Dooley et al. describe a recipe model that includes solutions for modeling reference food materials, and for appropriate tracking of food material identity across transformative processes.
ISD9 The Ninth Image Schema Day
Jönköping University, Sweden Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
Maarten Coegnarts João M. Cuhna Stefano De Giorgis Zoe Falomir Rafael Peñaloza Mihai Pomarlan Hawkin Guendalina Righetti Marco Schorlemmer Francis Steen
Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Germany University of Antwerp, Belgium University of Coimbra, Portugal Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands Umeå University, Sweden University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy University of Bremen, Germany University of Oslo, Norway IIIA-CSIC, Spain
University of California, US
The Image Schema Day is an annually occurring workshop devoted to research on cognitive primitives and investigations into the conceptual puzzle pieces that make the mind work, carried out from a wide variety of scientific disciplines.
The main focal point is the notion of image schemas; defined as experience turned into generalised, mental patterns that humans use to make sense of the world and construct linguistic expression, metaphors, and novel concepts. Originally a theory from cognitive linguistics, image schemas have become a common analytical tool in research in psychology, AI, art analysis and interaction design. Due to their universality, their potential as a component in intelligent computational systems, as a means to ground meaning of linguistic and artistic expressions, and to structure the information around us makes them an interesting and diverse field of study.
Running in its ninth edition, the ISD workshop series has become a platform for researchers from a wide variety of scientific, professional and artistic domains to discuss their use of these patterns and ifnd unexpected synergies.
Organised as a truly interdisciplinary event, each year, researchers from many diferent disciplines join the event. This year is no exception as the six accepted papers and four abstracts for presentation belong in disciplines spanning philosophy, linguistics, interaction design, film studies, theoretical computer science and robotics.
KM4LAW 4th International Workshop on Knowledge Management and Process Mining for Law
Davide Audrito University of Bologna, Italy Francesca Grasso University of Turin, Italy Roberto Nai University of Turin, Italy Emilio Sulis University of Turin, Italy
Guido Boella Chiara Di Francescomarino Rohan Nanda Italo Jose Da Silva Oliveira Livio Robaldo Davide Riva Galileo Sartor
University of Turin, Italy University of Turin, Italy University of Trento, Italy University of Maastricht, Netherlands Free University, Bozen-Bolzano Swansea University, Wales University of Milan, Italy
University of Bologna, Italy
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, and legal event log analysis, all of which can be paired with a multilingual approach. The fourth edition of the Knowledge Management and Process Mining for Law (KM4Law) workshop continues to serve as a forum to discuss these and other related topics.
The swift advancement of AI in recent years has brought us closer to addressing long-standing challenges in AI & Law. This progress makes it even more important to identify the limits of automated systems, especially when faced with unresolved intentional and unintentional ambiguities and conflicts that demand legal interpretation. This workshop seeks to shed light on these issues, exploring both the opportunities and the challenges that AI presents for knowledge representation in the legal domain.
The scope of the workshop remains broad, ranging from the classification of legal sources, legal design, and legal ontologies, to the study of legal decision similarity and clustering, prediction and support in judicial decision-making, and assistance in legal interpretation. Further topics include the identification of 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. Attention is also devoted to multilingual alignments of concepts, both domestic and international, and to the identification of legal references and network analysis.
In this fourth edition, two particularly interesting papers were presented. I. Spada et al. propose a framework that leverages recent advances in Large Language Models to extract events and temporal data from unstructured legal texts, with a focus on tender notices. Their approach demonstrates how event logs can be enriched with previously hidden information, thereby enabling more comprehensive and meaningful process mining analyses in the legal domain.
O. Hobai et al. introduce the Legal Document Ontology (LDO), a conceptual model that distinguishes structural and semantic entities in legal documents and establishes standardised relationships among them. By combining elements from existing ontologies, their contribution highlights how consistent modelling can improve both human understanding and machine interpretation of complex legal corpora.
The continued scientific interest and the quality of the contributions presented this year provide encouraging prospects for a fifth edition of the workshop, further advancing research at the intersection of AI, knowledge representation, and law.
2nd Annual Workshop on Convergence of Large-Language Models and Ontologies
Peter Elkin Jeremy Ravenel Ken Archer Jose Maria Parente de Oliveira Alcides Lopes
Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, University at Bufalo Chair, Department of Biomedical Informatics, University at Bufalo CEO, Naas.AI AI Director of Product, Microsoft Professor, Computer Science, Technological Institute of Aeronautics Knowledge Modeling Specialist, SysManager
Regina Hurley Finn Wilson Cristian Keroles Damayanthi Jesudas Beera William D. Duncan Sarah Ayed Micheal Debellis
Centre for Social Services Engineering, University of Toronto Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, University at Bufalo PhD Researcher, Department of Philosophy, University at Bufalo Ontologist, CUBRC, Inc.
Postdoc, College of Dentistry, University of Florida Clinical Associate Faculty, College of Dentistry, University of Florida Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, Arab Open University
Retired
The central theme of the Convergence of Large Language Models and Ontologies (ONTOLLM) workshop remains the same as in our inaugural meeting: that ontologies and knowledge graphs, grounded in formal semantics and logic, can serve as indispensable complements to LLMs. By pairing statistical language architectures with structured symbolic knowledge, researchers and practitioners can mitigate hallucinations, enable more trustworthy reasoning, and build hybrid architectures that extend the frontiers of artificial intelligence.
This second workshop once again brings together voices from academia, government, and industry to explore the opportunities and challenges of this convergence. Our program reflects the growing breadth of the field: from position pieces rethinking ontology evolution in the age of generative models, to case studies in safety-critical and industrial domains, to surveys mapping the landscape of retrievalaugmented generation enriched by ontological structure. Accepted submissions to this workshop include: • RAG Architecture to Integrate Ontologies and LLMs to Create a Climate Obstruction Portal Climate change remains one of humanity’s greatest challenges, yet coordinated action is often blocked by disinformation campaigns. This paper presents a neurosymbolic system that combines OWL reasoning with LLM embeddings to model theories from the Climate Social Science Network. The system can retrieve examples of climate obstruction from multiple databases, classify new cases such as greenwashing, and support causal modeling of disinformation. The next step is testing the system with social scientists to refine its practical use. • RAG and Ontologies for Information Retrieval: A Survey This review examines how ontologies and knowledge graphs improve retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems that rely on LLMs. It looks at application domains, methods, and data requirements, and assesses how structured semantics help improve retrieval quality and factual accuracy. The survey highlights both the benefits and current limitations of ontology-driven RAG. • Challenges in the Convergence of LLMs and Knowledge Graphs for Air Trafic Information Systems Air trafic management requires highly reliable information systems. This study explores a system that combines LLMs, RAG, and knowledge graphs to answer aviation queries using data from regulations, incidents, and operations in Brazil. Results show that broad, general-purpose graphs often reduce accuracy, while smaller, focused graphs give more precise answers. The work highlights the importance of knowledge granularity and careful design in safety-critical domains. • Advanced Planning and Scheduling with Semantic Knowledge Graphs and LLMs outlines a strategy to facilitate freeform text descriptions into advanced planning solutions, leveraging LLMs to automate the construction of knowledge graphs. The authors adopt a RAG-based strategy, specifically Retrieve and Re-Rank, to demonstrate the value of extracting semantics from free text in this domain.
These contributions signal a maturing research community that is moving beyond proofs of concept toward systematic investigation and deployment.
We thank the authors, reviewers, program committee, and all participants whose contributions have made this second edition of ONTOLLM possible. We look forward to the continued growth of this research area and to the collaborations that will shape the future of ontology-augmented AI.
OSS 3rd Workshop on Ontologies for Services and Social-good
Centre for Social Services Engineering, University of Toronto, Canada Centre for Social Services Engineering, University of Toronto, Canada University of Zurich, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada
Researcher, CNRS, IRIT, Université de Toulouse Postdoctoral Fellow, York University Ontology Development Lead, Simon Fraser University Research Fellow, Italian National Research Council, ItalianInstitute for Cognitive Sciences and Technologies Researcher, Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the CNR Research Fellow, Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, University College London
Semantic technologies ofer a formal approach to representing knowledge in a manner that is interpretable by computers, supported by a technology stack that facilitates the storage, integration, and querying of information semantically. Over the past decade, their growing role alongside AI has created exciting opportunities to apply them to increasingly complex societal challenges. The 3rd Workshop on Ontologies for Services and Social-good (OSS 2025), held in conjunction with the 5th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2025) and Joint Ontology Workshops (JOWO 2025) in Catania, Italy, continues this mission by fostering communication and strengthening interdisciplinary work at the intersection of semantic technologies, service provisioning, and social good. This year’s program reflects the richness of the field, with accepted papers spanning three tracks: Applications and Methods, Foundations, and Domain Ontologies. Together, these contributions demonstrate how ontologies can serve as unifying frameworks for conceptual clarity, interoperability, and real-world application in domains as diverse as healthcare, economics, urban planning, and social services. By bridging theory and practice, OSS 2025 showcases how semantic and ontological methods can empower practitioners, researchers, and policymakers to design more accountable, efective, and human-centered services. We hope that the discussions fostered during this workshop will inspire future collaborations and contribute to advancing the shared mission of applying semantic technologies for the greater good.
The Applications and Methods track highlights work at the interface of ontology-driven methodologies and practical deployment. One contribution introduces a methodology to manage linguistic uncertainty in shared decision-making texts, combining risk management practices with an ontology suitable for artificial intelligence applications where tolerance for uncertainty is limited. A second paper, focusing on urban systems, presents the KnOCS project, which integrates ontologies with discreteevent simulation to enable flexible, semantically rich, and risk-free modelling of smart city behaviours. Complementing these technical advances, another study addresses the design and evaluation of social services for newcomer youth, proposing a representational framework that aligns stakeholder needs, program objectives, and measurable outcomes, thereby strengthening coherence, communication, and outcome-based evaluation across the social service ecosystem. In the Foundations track, a single but conceptually significant paper tackles the ontological nature of money. Building on the “pure commodity theory,” the work develops a representation of money as a commodity in line with the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). This perspective provides a robust theoretical grounding for analyzing economic reality, while accommodating competing perspectives, such as the credit theory of money, and emphasizes the importance of foundational ontology in clarifying abstract yet socially critical concepts.
The Domain Ontologies track encompasses a diverse set of contributions that apply ontological methods to healthcare and occupational contexts. Two papers explore healthcare applications: one extends the Oral Health and Disease Ontology (OHD) to model the temporal and psychological dimensions of dental fear and anxiety, integrating multi-survey data to support personalized interventions; the other develops an ontology-based model for physiotherapy sessions within the SORTT project, extending the DOLCE ontology to support IoT-enabled systems that improve supervision and accessibility of patient care. Alongside these, another paper addresses the occupational domain by systematically defining concepts such as skills, abilities, competences, and related dispositions for inclusion in the Occupation Ontology (OccO). Together, these works demonstrate how ontologies can enhance data integration and semantic clarity in healthcare, therapy, and workforce applications, underscoring their role in improving both practical services and theoretical models.
Workshop on Promoting Healthy Aging through the Semantic Enrichment of Social Science
William D. Duncan Julie Bowker Hollen Reischer Yongun He
Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, University at Bufalo Clinical Associate Faculty, University of Florida Professor, University at Bufalo Visiting Assistant Professor, University at Bufalo Professor, University of Michigan
Regina Hurley Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, University at Bufalo Finn Wilson PhD Researcher, Department of Philosophy, University at Bufalo Neil Otte Senior Ontologist, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab Cristian Keroles Ontologist, CUBRC, Inc.
Tim Coleman Senior Ontologist, Basis Path John Bittner Senior Ontologist, Compass Federico Donato PhD Researcher, Department of Philosophy, University at Bufalo Sean Kindya PhD Researcher, Department of Philosophy, University at Bufalo Rachel Mavrovich Intern, National Center for Ontological Research Elena Milivinti PhD Researcher, Department of Philosophy, University at Bufalo Gregory DeFranco Jr. Intern, National Center for Ontological Research Preface Research on solitude has often been framed as a risk factor, linked to depression, cognitive decline, and mortality. However, research on gerotranscendence links solitude to a shift toward greater selftranscendence, connectedness, and wisdom in aging, framing solitude as a conduit for well-being. Despite the clear overlap, the research domains on solitude and gerotranscendence remain fragmented and conceptually ambiguous. The workshop is part of an efort to bridge this gap by seeking contributions exploring how semantic technologies can advance healthy aging research, with particular attention to solitude, gerotranscendence, and their intersections. Topics in scope included: • Formalizing constructs of solitude, loneliness, and transcendence across disciplines, • Developing ontologies or semantic models that integrate psychosocial and health data, • Identifying ethical and normative dimensions of modeling lived experiences in aging, • Showcasing use cases where ontology-driven approaches inform interventions for well-being.
The papers in this workshop demonstrate the promise of ontology applications to align research traditions, support practical applications, and inspire new directions in the study of healthy aging. You will find in this volume the following: Towards Healthy Aging through Semantic Enrichment. This paper introduces SOLO (Solitude Ontology) and GERO (Gerotranscendence Ontology), interoperable ontologies modeling psychological constructs central to healthy aging. Built on the Behavioral Change Intervention Ontology, they clarify distinctions between solitude, loneliness, self-transcendence, and gerotranscendence, while encoding their realization across the lifespan.
Groundwork for the Ontology of Curiosity. Curiosity is key to resilience in aging but remains inconsistently defined. This paper proposes an ontological framework grounded in Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) to distinguish curiosity as an emotional process and as a disposition. Subtypes of both categories are modeled, resolving ambiguities while aligning with empirical findings. Towards an Ontology-Based System to Foster Older Adults’ Mental Health via Indoor Comfort Management. This paper presents OAIC (Older Adults Indoor Comfort), an ontology-based framework supporting mental health by managing environmental factors like lighting, temperature, and air quality. Integrating standard ontologies (SOSA, ICD, ICF) with clinical measures such as the Geriatric Depression Scale, OAIC uses semantic rules to detect deviations from comfort thresholds and trigger adaptive interventions.
Closure Through an Ontological Lens. This paper explores “closure” as a key theme in narrative identity research, where individuals integrate past adversities into life stories. Using Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and extensions, the authors propose the Closure Design Pattern, modeling closure as a disposition linked to processes of moving beyond regret and fostering self-transcendence. Formalizing Heuristics: Cognitive Strategies for Decisions Under Constraint. This paper introduces the Heuristic Decision Ontology (HDO), which models heuristics as Directive Information Content Entities (DICE) in life-critical contexts like medical triage. Grounded in Basic Formal Ontology (BFO 2020) and aligned with Common Core Ontologies (CCO), HDO frames heuristics as prescriptive cognitive shortcuts guiding rapid judgment.
By clarifying constructs, enabling interoperability, and supporting practical applications, the papers collected here continue the efort towards advancing research on healthy aging by leveraging semantic technologies.
Planning and Ontology Workshop
CNR – Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies CNR – Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies CNR – Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies
Stefano Borgo Matteo De Pellegrin Chiara Di Francescomarino Mauro Dragoni Bastien Dussard
Jan Rosell Daniele Francesco Santamaria Corrado Santoro Federico Fausto Santoro Uli Sattler Walter Terkaj
Fondazione Bruno Kessler CNRS – Laboratoire de recherche spécialisé dans l’analyse et l’architecture des systèmes Oxford University University of Salerno University of Genova Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – Institut de Robotica i Informatica Industrial CNR – Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies CNR – Institute of Research on Population and Social Policies Heriot-Watt University Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya University of Catania University of Catania University of Catania University of Manchester CNR – Institute of Intelligent Industrial Technologies and Systems for Advanced Manufacturing Fondazione Bruno Kessler University of Huddersfield
CNR – Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies
Automated Planning and Ontology are two well-established fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The former investigates techniques to formally model and reason about the efects of actions, and decide the combinations of actions that allow an agent to achieve goals. The latter investigates techniques to formally represent and define knowledge (by formally describing domain entities and their interrelations), allowing agents to process information about objects, events, and other sorts of entities, and incrementally build and verify beliefs.
Both Automated Planning and Ontology generally rely on logic to model knowledge and reasoning over it, organizing reasoning mechanisms. They support the development of cognitive capabilities that autonomous agents need to efectively act in the real world.
Perspectival Ontology Workshop on Entities that can be Realized
Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil Samsung R&D Institute Brazil (SRBR) CNRS, Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT), France
John Beverley Stefano Borgo Rodrigo Calhau Ludger Jansen Max Kistler Ítalo Oliveira Barry Smith Fumiaki Toyoshima
Federal University of Espírito Santo, Brazil University at Bufalo, USA Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR, Italy Federal Institute of Espírito Santo, Brazil PTH Brixen College, Italy University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France University of Twente, Netherlands University at Bufalo, USA
Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland
There is a long-standing view according to which potency precedes actuality. Under this view, the happening of an event consists in the realization or manifestation of potentialities that already exist in the event’s participants. Indeed, the world seems full of entities that encapsulate such potentialities, which we usually refer to as realizable entities, with dispositions being among the most significant ones. A disposition is an entity that inheres in another entity and determines the behavior of the latter under certain circumstances. Dispositions are closely related to the causal powers that objects have in the world and encompass what we usually call abilities, capabilities, tendencies, propensities, liabilities, capacities, and so on.
As they link the static structure of the world (i.e., the endurants/continuants that populate it) to its dynamical structure (i.e., the perdurants/occurrents that can happen to or be performed by such continuants), realizable entities have become a popular topic in the Formal Ontology community, being subject of active research. Among other applications, realizable entities have been employed to represent diseases and biological functions, provide ontological grounds for risks and probabilities, model engineered artifacts and afordances, and describe organizational capabilities and social roles.
The purpose of POWERs was to turn the spotlight on this issue, providing a venue for researchers and practitioners to present their work on dispositions and other realizable entities, exploring their various perspectives with an interdisciplinary lens.
The four papers presented at POWERs 2025 advance the study of realizable entities by probing their scope, representation, and application across diverse fields. Neuhaus discusses a limitation of BFO 2020: its inability to accommodate functions, roles, and dispositions of generically dependent continuants such as software and datasets. He examines the structural reasons for this gap and proposes both defined class-based workarounds and principled modifications to BFO, thereby extending its adequacy for computational artifacts and their roles in modeling. The paper of Schulz, Dumontier, Remzi, Serafimova, and Martínez Costa can be seen as complementing this efort by expanding the typology of realizable entities to include structured and epistemic forms, such as plans and information content entities. Their unified “ refers to” relation generalizes realization, concretization, and aboutness, and is supported by OWL design patterns aimed at reasoning with both individuals and universals, including hypothetical or future entities. Adamo, Willis, Mosca, and Sperotto turn to the domain of climate change and disaster risk, analyzing the contested semantics of vulnerability. They highlight its multi-dimensional, dynamic character and propose preliminary guidelines for clarifying and systematizing its ontological treatment. Finally, Jansen and Yargan approach realizable entities through the lens of engineering design, proposing an ontological treatment of working principles in terms of dispositions, their bearers and triggers.
These contributions beautifully reflect the vibrant research currently being conducted on this topic and exemplify the many facets of realizable entities. We hope they will inspire further exploration and discussion in the field.
PwM2 2nd Playing with Meanings workshop
Universitat Politècnica de València (ES)
Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (IT)
Playing with Meanings returns this year to the Joint Ontology Workshops program for its second iteration, PwM2, a full-day workshop that continues the exploration of games, play and ontologybased group conceptual modelling. Participants to the workshop will be guided through a series of structured, rule-based, discursive interactions that are designed to incite stimulating discussion around the topic of ontologies and conceptual modelling as mediums for eliciting, mediating and visualising shared understandings. Playing with Meanings takes a distinctly human-centric approach, exploring participatory methods for inclusion and diversity, collectively voicing perspectives, experiences and worldview(s) while co-producing formal, human- and machine-readable knowledge. The convivial 3rd place and collaborative social contract of game and play set the stage for PwM activities, fostering intersubjective engagement between participants, navigating expertise discourses, and allowing every participant to articulate their knowledge and opinions as equal contributions to group discussions. In combination with games, we practice various methods of ontology-based group modelling to concretise players’ emergent, shared understandings of concepts and their relations, leveraging visual and embodied communication in the creation of conceptual models, discursive artefacts in and of themselves, which aid in establishing, interrogating and co-producing knowledge.
PwM strives for a relaxed atmosphere of competitive fun and open-ended play, and is open to all JOWO and FOIS attendees. The workshop is divided into fixed sessions, each introducing and playing a purpose-built ontology-based group modelling game to allow participants to experience the actual co-production of knowledge while practicing in-game group modelling techniques and discussing the potentials to apply these participatory practices to their own research and development projects. The games to be showcased at PwM2 will include: • Risky Futures, an updated version of our adversarial discourse game which guides teams to imagine future socio-ecological, socio-political and socio-technical risks and responses to them, using a variety of ontology-based reference models; • Particular Universes, our new game for competitive group modelling using Basic Formal Ontology (BFO)1 entities and relations, which plays on themes such as cats, mummies, donuts, holes and interstellar objects; • A proto-game experiment exploring Impact Chain2 climate and disaster risk analysis using a dual-perspective model that combines Social-Ecological Systems Integrated Ontology (SESsION)3 and Common Ontology of Values and Risk (COVER)4.
Attendees to the conference are welcome to join for any or all of the workshop sessions, and in-between the dedicated game-play events, the games will be available for visitors to explore freely. For more information please feel free to contact Max Willis and/or Greta Adamo at: info@ humanfactorsinsemantics.net
2nd International Workshop on Modeling for Cybersecurity Ítalo Oliveira Daniele Francesco Santamaria Gal Engelberg Gianpietro Castiglione Giampaolo Bella
University of Twente University of Catania Accenture Labs Israel, University of Haifa University of Catania
University of Catania
Semantic Shields II: 2nd International Workshop on Modeling for Cybersecurity The workshop provided a forum for discussing both theoretical foundations and practical applications of conceptual models and ontologies in the field of cybersecurity.
Cybersecurity, which encompasses both human and technological dimensions, refers to the set of techniques and practices designed to protect the integrity of networks, systems, applications, and data from attacks, damage, or unauthorized access. As digital infrastructures expand, cyber-attacks continue to increase in sophistication, exploiting a growing variety of tactics such as social engineering, malware, and ransomware. In response, new methods and technologies are constantly emerging to mitigate risks and counteract exploitation attempts.
Among these approaches, formal methods—and ontologies in particular—ofer powerful means to reduce the incompleteness and ambiguity of security policies. They enable the semantic characterization of security stakeholders and processes, covering aspects ranging from ofensive techniques to compliance, vulnerability management, encryption, data protection, authentication, confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
Semantic Shields aims to bring together cybersecurity experts, conceptual modelers, and ontology researchers—spanning academia, industry, and practice—to advance methods, applications, and tools that strengthen cybersecurity through conceptual and semantic approaches.
5th International Workshop on Semantic Web and Ontology Design for Cultural Heritage
Roberta Ferrario Stéphane Jean Béatrice Markhof Alessandro Mosca Marianna Nicolosi-Asmundo
University College London ISTC-CNR University of Poitiers – ENSMA University of Tours Free University of Bozen-Bolzano University of Catania
Valentina Bartalesi Carmen Brando Catherine Faron Manolis Gergatsoulis Kalliopi Kontiza Konstantinos Kotis Ludovica Marinucci Yannis Marketakis Nada Mimouni Laura Pandolfo Louise Parkin Davide Picca Emilio Sanfilippo Daniele Francesco Santamaria Michalis Sfakakis Daria Spampinato Sofia Stamou Maria Rosaria Stufano Melone Maria Theodoridou Konstantin Todorov Christos Tryfonopoulos Douglas Tudhope Jouni Tuominen Genoveva Vargas-Solar Costas Vassilakis Dan Vodislav
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Norway) ISTI-CNR EHESS Paris Université Côte d’Azur Department of Archives, Library Sciences and Museology UCL University of the Aegean, Dept. of Cultural Technology and Communication CID Ethics, CNR Institute of Computer Science, FORTH-ICS CEDRIC lab - CNAM Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers Paris University of Sassari University of Tours University of Lausanne ISTC-CNR University of Catania Dept. Archives, Library Science and Museology, Ionian University ISTC-CNR Ionian University Dicatech, Technical University of Bari FORTH-ICS University of Montpellier University of Peloponnese University of South Wales University of Helsinki Laboratoire d’InfoRmatique en Image et Systèmes d’information University of Peloponnese
ETIS, CNRS, University of Cergy-Pontoise
SWODCH 2025 is the fifth edition of the International Workshop on Semantic Web and Ontology Design for Cultural Heritage.
Following the tradition of the previous workshops, the purpose of the 2025 edition of SWODCH is two-fold: First, it aims to gather foundational research work on the design of conceptual models, knowledge graphs, ontologies, and Semantic Web (SW) technologies for Cultural Heritage (CH) and the Digital Humanities (DH). A plethora of heterogeneous and multi- format data currently available in these domains asks for principled methodologies and technologies to semantically characterise, integrate, and reason with data, and to support their retrieval, management, analysis and visualisation. Philosophical and sociological analyses of data, knowledge representation models, and modeling practices in CH and DH, possibly taking into account the social or historical dimensions of data, are also within the scope of the workshop. Second, SWODCH aims to bring together stakeholders from various fields of Computer Science and the Humanities involved in the development and deployment of concrete SW solutions for CH, eficiently building, managing, exploring, visualising or mining CH knowledge graphs. More than 20 years after the beginning of this century, any SW solution should be designed according to the FAIR principles and the workshop supports the creation of datasets and applications that embrace and are compliant with these principles.
For this edition, we received 9 submissions. Each paper was peer-reviewed by at least three experts in the field based on five criteria: relevance to the topics of the workshop, originality, quality of presentation, technical quality, and reusability. Given the high quality of the submitted manuscripts, all of them were accepted.
The topics of the papers included: Representing cultural heritage knowledge (“Development of the Lem Knowledge Graph: Implementation of LRMoo Ontology”, “From the Hellenic peristyle to the monastic cloister: an architectural legacy traced through ontology”, “Towards a realism-based ontology of archeology: Artifacts, CIDOC-CRM and BFO” ); Ontologies for linguistic phenomena and qualitative research (“Ontological approaches to morpho-semantics in Modern Greek derivation”, “An Etymological Dataset for Nouns and Verbs in the Gallo-Italic Variety Spoken in Nicosia and Sperlinga”, “Domain Ontology for Grounded Theory Qualitative Research: Bridging Interpretation and Structure in Digital Humanities” ); Ontologies to represent, navigate and classify musical and literary works (“Using Omeka S in Cataloguing Stanisław Lem’s Letters”, “Modeling Knowledge for the PAVES-e Project: a Formal Ontology of Cesare Pavese’s Work”, “A Preliminary Investigation on Event Modeling in Music: Performances and Their Reception” ).