Call for Papers

JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SYSTEMS (JAIS)

SPECIAL ISSUE
ON
ONTOLOGIES IN THE CONTEXT OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS


GUEST EDITORS
Rajiv Kishore and R. Ramesh
School of Management
SUNY at Buffalo
Buffalo, NY 14260-4000

JAIS SE: Yair Wand
Sauder School of Business
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z2


INTRODUCTION

Ontology as “the metaphysical study of the nature of being and 
existence” is as old as the discipline of philosophy. More recently, 
ontology has been defined as “the science of what is, of the kinds and 
structures of objects, properties, events, processes, and relations in 
every area of reality.” While it remains a fertile area of research in 
the field of philosophy, ontology has been a subject matter of inquiry, 
development, and application for quite some time now in disciplines 
related to computation, information, and knowledge. Recently there has 
been an explosion in the interest and application of ontological 
principles in a number of disciplines, including chemistry, enterprise 
management, geography, linguistics, mathematics, medicine, etc., to 
create domain-specific ontologies. As a result, while the philosophy 
discipline still treats ontology in the singular because it deals with 
the nature of all reality, other disciplines take a rather narrower 
view of ontology and use it only in the limited context of domain-
specific reality. Consequently, there is no more ontology but 
ontologies, and each individual ontology in a particular domain deals 
with only a limited portion of reality that is pertinent to that 
domain. The goal behind creating domain-specific ontologies is to 
structure and codify knowledge about the concepts, relationships, and 
axioms/constraints pertaining to that domain in a computational format 
so that it can be manipulated and utilized by the computer to aid human 
and machine agents in their performance of tasks within the domain.

Ontologies can become a fruitful subject of inquiry and development in 
the information systems (IS) discipline. Information systems are 
essentially knowledge artifacts that capture and represent knowledge 
about certain domains (e.g. in the form of entities, relationships, 
constraints, and processes). Consequently, IS professionals and 
researchers have traditionally dealt with issues of identifying, 
capturing, and representing such domain knowledge within information 
systems. Philosophical ontology has been utilized in the IS discipline 
in the past as a basis for evaluating systems analysis modeling 
techniques and grammars. Ontological principles have also informed the 
development of organizational knowledge ontologies and knowledge 
management systems. Clearly, this area of work remains a fertile area 
for research. Recently the notion of “ontology-driven information 
systems” (ODIS) has also been proposed that opens up new ways of 
thinking about ontologies and IS in conjunction with each other and 
covers both the structural and the temporal dimensions of information 
systems. In the structural dimension, ontologies can provide mechanisms 
for structuring and storing generic IS content including database 
schemas, user interface objects, and application programs that can be 
customized and integrated into a functioning IS. In the temporal 
dimension, ontologies can guide the development of new information 
systems by helping analysts/designers choose appropriate processes, 
algorithms, rules, and software components depending upon their needs. 
It has also been suggested recently that ontologies, frameworks, and 
systems are essentially knowledge artifacts at different levels of 
knowledge abstraction and, therefore, systems can be generated from 
bounded-universe ontologies through specialization and combination. It 
also appears that the emerging paradigms such as web services and the 
semantic web will enable the large-scale development, deployment, and 
sharing of ontologies and ontology-driven information systems.


COVERAGE

The special issue of JAIS invites high-quality conceptual, analytical 
and empirical articles representing original contributions dealing with 
the design, technical, managerial, behavioral, and organizational 
aspects of ontology-driven information systems. Potential topics 
include but are not limited to:

o	Role of ontologies in information systems
o	Evaluation of systems analysis modeling techniques using 
ontological principles
o	Ontologies as a reuse-enabling platform for information systems 
development 
o	Ontologies as representation languages vs. ontologies as 
knowledge bases
o	Ontologies and object-orientation
o	Modeling and design of ontologies
o	Conceptual and formal representation of ontologies
o	Metrics for ontologies and ontological engineering
o	Ontological quality assessment
o	Representing behavioral knowledge and constraints in ontologies
o	Tools and environments for ontology development
o	Relationships between ontologies, frameworks, patterns, and 
components
o	Learning ontologies and maintenance of ontologies
o	Evolution and growth of ontologies
o	Onto-mining: Mining and knowledge discovery from Ontologies
o	Modeling and design of ontology-driven information systems
o	Organizational and process models for ontology-driven 
information systems
o	Ontologies for enterprise systems, integrative business 
information systems, and workflow systems
o	Use of ontologies for organizational knowledge management and 
knowledge management systems
o	Co-design of business and IT using ontologies
o	Modeling Web services components using ontological principles
o	Modeling the semantic web as an ontology


REVIEW PROCESS

All submissions will be peer-reviewed following the review process of 
JAIS.
JAIS follows a developmental review process, unlike the traditional 
review process. The objective is to apply very high standards of 
acceptance while ensuring fair, timely and efficient review cycles. For 
more details see the JAIS Special Issue on Ontologies website at 
http://www.mgt.buffalo.edu/jais_special_issue_on_ontologies. 


TIME TABLE

1.	PHASE A: Extended Abstracts Due:  December 15, 2003
2.	PHASE A: Feedback from Editors: January 15, 2004
3.	PHASE B: Full Initial Papers Due: April 15, 2004
4.	PHASE B: Editorial Review Cycles Completed by: July 15, 2004
5.	PHASE B: Workshop Presentations: Date TBD
6.	PHASE C: Fully Developed Papers for Peer Review Due: September 
15, 2004
7.	PHASE C: Reviews back to Authors by: December 15, 2004
8.	PHASE C: Revised Papers Due: January 15, 2005
9.	PHASE C: Acceptance Decisions by: February 28, 2005
10.	PHASE C: Final Versions of Accepted Papers Due: March 31, 2005


INQUIRIES AND SUBMISSIONS:

Please send your inquiries to Rajiv Kishore at rkishore@buffalo.edu or 
R. Ramesh at rramesh@buffalo.edu. Abstracts and papers should be 
submitted through the JAIS special issue website at 
http://www.mgt.buffalo.edu/jais_special_issue_on_ontologies. The 
website for submissions will become available by November 15, 2003.

Received on Monday, 13 October 2003 18:24:51 UTC