FOIS 2010 - FOIS 2010 6th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems

The FOIS conference series began with the first meeting in Trento, Italy, in June 1998, which was followed by meetings in 2001, 2004, 2006, and 2008. The sixth FOIS conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, during 11-14 May 2010, and we are now calling for papers to be considered for inclusion in the conference.

Ontology began life in ancient times as a fundamental part of philosophical enquiry concerned with the analysis and categorisation of what exists. In recent years, the subject has taken a practical turn with the advent of complex computerised information systems which are reliant on robust and coherent representations of their subject matter. The systematisation and elaboration of such representations and their associated reasoning techniques constitute the modern discipline of formal ontology, which is now being applied to such diverse domains as artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, bioinformatics, GIS, knowledge engineering, information retrieval, and the Semantic Web. Researchers in all these areas are becoming increasingly aware of the need for serious engagement with ontology, understood as a general theory of the types of entities and relations making up their respective domains of enquiry, to provide a solid foundation for their work.

FOIS is intended to provide a meeting point for researchers from these and other disciplines with an interest in formal ontology, where both theoretical issues and concrete applications can be explored in a spirit of genuine interdisciplinarity.