FOIS-2004
International
Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems
Picture courtesy of Fototeca Web del Comune di Torino
November
4-6, 2004
Torino (Italy)
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Conference Description
Just as ontology developed
over the centuries as part of philosophy, so in recent years ontology
has become intertwined with the development of the information
sciences. Researchers in such areas as artificial intelligence, formal
and computational linguistics, biomedical informatics, conceptual
modeling, knowledge engineering and information retrieval have come to
realize that a solid foundation for their research calls for serious
work in ontology, understood as a general theory of the types of
entities and relations that make up their respective domains of
inquiry. In all these
areas, attention has started to focus on the content of
information rather than on just the formats and languages
in terms of which information is represented. The clearest example
of this development is provided by the many initiatives growing up
around the project of the Semantic Web. And as the need for
integrating research in these different fields arises, so does
the realization that strong principles for building well-founded
ontologies might provide significant advantages over ad hoc, case-based
solutions. The tools of Formal Ontology address precisely these needs,
but a real effort is required in order to apply such philosophical
tools to the domain of Information Systems. Reciprocally, research in
the information science raises specific ontological questions which
call for further philosophical investigations.
The purpose of FOIS is to provide
a forum for genuine interdisciplinary exchange in the spirit of a
unified ontological analysis effort. Although the primary focus of the
conference is on theoretical issues, methodological proposals as well
as papers
dealing with concrete applications from a well-founded theoretical
perspective are welcome.
Conference Chair
Nicola Guarino (ISTC-CNR, Trento,
Italy)
nicola.guarino@loa-cnr.it
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