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.

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

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 available at:
``http://mnemosyne.itc.it:1024/fois98/submissions.html''
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.

The proceedings will be published in the IOS-Press (Amsterdam) bookseries "Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications" 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 (see instructions at the FOIS'98 web page ``http://mnemosyne.itc.it:1024/fois98/''). Final papers will be allowed at most fourteen (14) pages in the conference proceedings style (corresponding to approximately 20 article-style LaTex pages).

CONFERENCE CHAIR:

ORGANIZATION CHAIR:

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)
• Ingvar Johansson (Dept. of Philosophy and Philosophy of Science, Umea Univ., Sweden)
• 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)
• James Pustejovsky (Computer Science Dept., Brandeis 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)