Information Artifact Ontologies

A Full-Day Workshop organized as part of FOIS (Formal Ontology in Information Systems 2014

Rio de Janeiro, September 22, 2014

Information artifacts are artifacts – such as photographs, newspaper articles, entries in databases, computer programs, emails, video clips – which are used in ways that depend on their being about something (having a topic or content or subject-matter). Information artifacts exist in the real world and are used in various ways. In some cases information artifacts are are used in ways that do not depend on their aboutness (as when a newspaper is used to light a fire). In most cases, though, we care about what information artifacts are about, because we exploit this aboutness in achieving our ends. Various attempts have been made to create controlled vocabularies for the consistent formulation of metadata pertaining to entities of these sorts in order to enhance the degree to which the content formulated with their aid will be available to computational reasoning. In addition to their topic (content, aboutness) information artifacts have a variety of further attributes, including format, purpose, evidence, provenance, operational relevance, security markings. Data concerning such attributes (often called ‘metadata’) are vital to the effective exploitation of the reports, images, or signals documents for purposes of discovery and analysis.

A range of resources for the description of such metadata have been developed in the Semantic Web, library science and other communities, including:

Dublin Core

EDAM

FRBR-aligned Bibliographic Ontology (FaBiO)

Information Artifact Ontology (IAO)

List of ontologies using IAO

LOINC Document Ontology

Systems Biology Ontology (SBO) , has many data types, mathematical expressions and algorithms. Also related ontologies KiSAO and Teddy. See

OTHERS?

The goal of this workshop is to advance coordination of these efforts along the following axes:

1. discussion of foundational issues concerning the ontological treatment of information artifacts and information entities and also concerning issues of dissemination (how can we advance the degree to which different communities use common, useful and usable ontologies)

2. addressing the relations, and if possible advancing convergence, between IAO, the family of IAO extension ontologies, and other resources developed to represent information artifacts in various domains.

3. sharing of information on existing resources and on plans for further development (including plans for coordination)

The workshop will consist in a mixture of submitted and invited short progress reports under heading 1, together with longer papers (subject to refereeing) under headings 2. and 3. In addition, there will be working session devoted to addressing controversial issues and helping to consolidate plans for future work. Interested participants are invited to submit a one-page description of the issue they plan to address to facilitate progress during the working sessions. We will take steps to ensure that we have at least 6 peer-reviewed papers of a minimum of 5 pages each, in order to allow publication in the CEUR-WS series.

The goal of this workshop is to advance coordination of these efforts along the following axes:

1. parallel tutorial sessions on IAO and other ontology resources

2. long (5-page) papers discussing foundational issues concerning the ontological treatment of information artifacts and information entities, especially with a view to advancing convergence or alignment of existing resources

3. short (1-page) progress reports designed to support sharing of information on existing resources and on plans for further development

Draft Schedule

The workshop will be organized as follows:

9.30-11am Tutorial sessions (including at least one tutorial on IAO)

11.30-12.30pm Research papers

1.30-3.00pm Research papers

3.30-4:30pm Research papers

4:30-5:30pm Short progress reports

Rules for submissions

IOS http://www.iospress.nl/service/authors/latex-and-word-tools-for-book-authors/

Organizing Committee

Mauricio B. Almeida (Minas Gerais)

Mathias Brochhausen (Arkansas)

Laura Slaughter (Oslo)

Barry Smith (Chair, Buffalo)

Scientific Committee (draft)

Werner Ceusters (Buffalo)? Paolo Ciccarese (Harvard)? Melanie Courtot (Vancouver)? Janna Hastings (EBI) Lawrence Hunter (Colorado)? Tatiana Malyuta (CUNY) Bjoern Peters (San Diego)?

Timeline

Deadline for submissions: May 22, 2014

Deadline for notification of acceptance: June 15, 2014

Deadline for camera-ready copy August 15, 2014

Workshop proceedings will be published with CEUR-WS

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We need to have at least 6 peer-reviewed papers of a minimum of 5 pages each, in order to allow publication in the CEUR-WS series.

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