FOIS 2012: 7th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems          

Ontology began as a fundamental part of philosophical enquiry concerned with the analysis and categorization of what exists. In recent years, the subject has taken a practical turn with the advent of complex information systems which rely on robust and coherent representations of their subject matter. The systematization and elaboration of such representations and their associated reasoning techniques constitute the modern discipline of formal ontology. Formal Ontology is now applied to such diverse domains as artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, bioinformatics, GIS, knowledge engineering, information retrieval, and the Semantic Web. FOIS is intended to gather researchers with an interest in formal ontology, where both theoretical issues and concrete applications can be explored in an interdisciplinary spirit.

FOIS 2012 is collocated with ICBO 2012, the third International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies. Ontologies are increasingly used in biology and medicine, and their use in annotation of both clinical and experimental data is now common technique in integrative translational research. They are being developed for the description of biological and biomedical phenomena. To be maximally effective, such ontologies must work well together. As ontologies become more commonly used, the problems involved in achieving coordination in ontology development become ever more urgent. This conference addresses these problems. ICBO 2012 brings together representatives of all major communities involved in the development and application of ontologies in biomedicical research, health care, and related areas. In addition to papers, the conference will feature workshops and tutorials, as well as software demonstrations and a doctoral symposium.
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Chairs: Michael Grüninger, Maureen Donnelly, Giancarlo Guizzardi
Publicity: Frank Loebe
 

FOIS is the flagship conference of the International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA).