FOIS'98 - Call for Papers

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			Preliminary Call for Papers

			INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON
		   FORMAL ONTOLOGY IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS
				  FOIS'98

			    In conjunction with
	     the 6th International Conference on Principles of
		Knowledge Representation and Reasoning KR'98

		       TRENTO, ITALY, JUNE 6-8, 1998

		     Under the auspices of the Project
				  ONTOINT 
(Ontological Tools for Heterogeneous Knowledge Organization and Integration)
	      funded by the Italian National Research Council


Research   on ontology is becoming  increasingly  widespread in the computer
science community. Its  importance has been  recognized in fields as diverse
as qualitative modelling of physical  systems, natural language  processing,
knowledge engineering, information  integration, database design, geographic
information science, and intelligent  information access.  Various workshops
addressing the engineering  aspects of ontology have  been held in the  past
few years. However,  ontology -by its  very nature- ought  to  be a unifying
discipline. Insights in this field have potential  impacts on the whole area
of information systems. In order  to provide a  solid general foundation for
this work,   it is therefore  important to  focus  on  the common scientific
principles and open problems arising  from current tools, methodologies, and
applications of ontology. The purpose of this conference is  to take a first
step in this direction.
    As the heterogeneity of  the program committee indicates, the conference
will have a  strongly   interdisciplinary character.  Expected  participants
include computer science practitioners  as well as linguists, logicians, and
philosophers. Although the primary focus of the conference is on theoretical
issues, methodological   proposals as  well  as  papers  addressing concrete
applications from a well-founded theoretical perspective are welcome.

TOPICS
Examples of problem areas that may be addressed at the conference include:

THEORETICAL ISSUES
 *  Foundations:
       parthood, constitution, identity, integrity, dependence, causality
 *  Kinds of entity:
       particulars vs. universals, continuants vs. occurrents, 
       abstracta vs. concreta, attributes, relations, qualities, 
       quantities, tropes or moments, states, situations, environments
 *  Matter, space, time, motion, change
 *  Natural kinds, organisms, artifacts
 *  The ontology of social reality:
       legal and administrative entities, artistic expressions
 *  The ontology of information and information processing:
       representations, signs, software products, virtual reality,
       cyberspace
 *  Top-level ontological taxonomies:
       new proposals or critical analyses of existing ones
 * Cognitive foundations of ontological distinctions
 *  Kinds of ontology:
       top-level ontologies, domain ontologies, task ontologies,
       application ontologies
 *  Ontological commitment

APPLICATION AREAS
 *  Knowledge organization, integration and standardization
 *  Intelligent information access
 *  Information systems design
 *  Knowledge engineering
 *  Conceptual modelling
 *  Qualitative modelling
 *  Lexical semantics
 *  Terminology integration
 *  Product knowledge integration
 *  Geographic information systems
 *  Legal information systems

TOOLS AND METHODOLOGIES
 *  Ontological and linguistic instruments for conceptual analysis
 *  Methodologies for ontology development, maintenance, and integration

SUBMISSION  OF PAPERS

Papers will be selected on  the  basis of  a rigorous  review of full  paper
contributions.  Authors should submit  5 copies  to  the Conference Chair by
December 19, 1997.  Papers received after the deadline  or not conforming to
the submission format will be rejected without  review. The proceedings will
be printed   by   a   major   publisher and   will   be available    at  the
conference. Final camera-ready copies of the accepted papers  will be due by
March 9,   1998.   Authors will  be   responsible  for preparing  the  final
camera-ready in conformity with the formatting requirements laid down by the
publisher.

Submitted papers must be unpublished and substantially different from papers
under review.   Papers  that  have  been  or  will  be  presented   at small
workshops/symposia whose proceedings are  available only to attendees may be
submitted.

Each submission should include a title page containing the title, author(s),
affiliation(s), submitting  author's mailing  address, telephone number, fax
number and e-mail address,  as well as an  abstract and  keywords indicating
the       topic  areas    listed    above      that   best    describe   the
contribution. Submissions must be at most 16 pages, excluding the title page
and the bibliography, with a maximum of 38 lines  per page and an average of
75 characters   per line (corresponding  to  the  LaTeX article-style, 12pt)
using LaTeX or Microsoft  Word.  Papers should be  sent in 5 copies.  Fax or
electronic submissions will not be accepted.

Those proposing to submit papers  must complete the form  at the WWW address
<http://mnemosyne.itc.it:1024/fois98/> by  Monday  December   15, 1997.   If
intending authors do not have  WWW access, then  an  e-mail message must  be
sent  to   <fois98@irst.itc.it> by the  same  date,   giving details  of any
proposed submission in the following format:

Title: <Title of paper>
Author: <Last name, initials>
Author: <Insert as many more author lines as necessary>
...
CorrespondingAuthor: <name of corresponding author>
CorrespondingEmail: <email of corresponding author>
CorrespondingAddress: <address of corresponding author>
Keywords: <insert list of keywords, preferably chosen from above list>
Abstract: <insert short abstract, max 200 words>
EndAbstract: <mark the end of the short abstract thus>

Should  intending authors  not  have  e-mail  access, the information  above
should be   sent by  letter   to arrive to  the  Conference  Chair by Monday
December 15, 1997.

SCHEDULE

Monday, December            15, 1997   Electronic abstracts due
Friday, December            19, 1997   Papers due
Friday, February             6, 1998   Results sent to authors
Monday, March                9, 1998   Final papers due
Saturday-Monday, June      6-8, 1998   FOIS'98

CONFERENCE COMMITTEE

CONFERENCE CHAIR                        ORGANIZATION CHAIR
 Nicola Guarino                          Alessandro Artale
 National Research Council               ITC-IRST
 LADSEB-CNR                              Povo, I-38050 Trento, Italy
 Corso Stati Uniti, 4                    e-mail: artale@irst.itc.it
 I-35127 Padova, Italy
 e-mail: guarino@ladseb.pd.cnr.it

PROGRAM  COMMITTEE

John Bateman
 (Dept. of English Studies, Univ. of Stirling, UK)
B. Chandrasekaran
 (Dept. of Computer and Information Science, Ohio State Univ., USA)
Tony Cohn
 (Division of Artificial Intelligence, Univ. of Leeds, UK)
Ernest Davis
 (Courant Institute for Mathematical Sciences, New York, USA)
Richard Fikes
 (Knowledge Systems Lab., Stanford University, USA)
Kit Fine
 (Dept. of Philosophy, Univ. of California at Los Angeles, USA)
Mark Fox
 (Dept. of Industrial Engineering, Univ. of Toronto, Canada)
Nicola Guarino
 (LADSEB-CNR, National Research Council, Padova, Italy)
Patrick J. Hayes
 (Inst. for Human and Machine Cognition, Univ. of West Florida, USA)
Graeme Hirst
 (Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Toronto, Canada)
David Israel
 (Artificial Intelligence Center, SRI International, Menlo Park, USA)
Fritz Lehmann
 (CYCorp, Austin, Texas, USA)
Diego Marconi
 (Dept. of Humanities, Univ. of Torino at Vercelli, Italy)
Richiro Mizoguchi
 (Inst. of Scientific and Industrial Research, Osaka Univ., Japan)
Kevin Mulligan
 (Dept. of Philosophy, Univ. of Geneva, Switzerland)
Sergei Nirenburg
 (Computing Research Lab., New Mexico State Univ., USA)
Guus Schreiber
 (Dept. of Social Science Informatics, Univ. of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Peter Simons
 (School of Philosophy, Univ. of Leeds, UK and Ontek Corp., USA)
Doug Skuce
 (Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Ottawa, Canada)
Barry Smith
 (Dept. of Philosophy, State Univ. of New York at Buffalo, USA)
John Sowa
 (Philosophy and Computers and Cognitive Science, Binghamton Univ., USA)
Mike Uschold
 (Boeing Corporation, Seattle, USA)
Reind Van De Riet
 (Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Vrije Univ., The Netherlands)
Achille Varzi
 (Dept. of Philosophy, Columbia Univ., New York, USA)
Laure Vieu
 (IRIT - CNRS, Toulouse, France)
Yair Wand
 (Faculty of Commerce and Business Admin., Univ. of British Columbia, Canada)
Ron Weber
 (The Univ. of Queensland, Australia)
Chris Welty
 (Dept. of Computer Science, Vassar College, New York, USA)
Roel Wieringa
 (Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Vrije Univ., The Netherlands)

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
 Alessandro Artale - Enrico Franconi       (ITC-IRST, Trento, Italy)
 Nicola Guarino - Claudio Masolo           (LADSEB-CNR, Padova, Italy)
 Luca Pazzi - Sonia Bergamaschi            (Univ. of Modena, Italy)
 Geri Steve - Aldo Gangemi                 (ITBM-CNR, Roma, Italy)
 Cristiano Castelfranchi - Rino Falcone    (IP-CNR, Roma, Italy)

Received on Wednesday, 6 August 1997 07:43:04 UTC