The Foundational Stance

FOUST IX

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9th Workshop on Foundational Ontology

FOUST IX program

Stay tuned…

About

Foundational Ontologies are attempts to systematize very high-level categories of reality or thought. In practical terms, they aim to understand and formalise the meaning of very general terms, such as “object”, “event”, “property”, “time”, “quality”, “relation”, and “process”. Once formalised, these terms provide the top-level categories that are in principle common to many (if not all) domains of application. Consequently, Foundational Ontologies are widely acknowledged as crucial tools for tackling system and software interoperability issues.

Despite this recognition, there is less consensus on the specific entities a foundational ontology should cover, its organizational structure, its scope, and even its role in relation to more specialized domain ontologies. This lack of consensus often reflects deep-rooted debates stemming from different philosophical perspectives on reality, mind, and language.

The workshop aims to create a platform for researchers to explore the foundational aspects of applied ontology. This encompasses discussing philosophical foundations, presenting new research on specific foundational ontologies, discussing existing foundational ontologies, comparing them, and examining their relevance to the broader ontological enterprise.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

  • Changes to existing foundational ontologies/extensions by new modules.
  • Novel research on any specific category or topic that is usually covered by foundational ontology:
    • functions,
    • roles,
    • time,
    • mereology,
    • ontological dependence,
    • constitution,
    • properties and intensional entities,
    • collectives and social entities.
  • Theoretical results about specific foundational ontologies (e.g., consistency proofs, modularizations)
  • Application results of foundational ontologies in AI, the Semantic Web, Linguistics and more.
  • Conceptual and formal comparisons and alignments of foundational ontologies.
  • Relationship and alignment of foundational ontologies and domain ontologies.
  • Philosophical foundations for applied ontology.

Submissions, preliminary information

We encourage different types of contributions (page number includes references, presentations include Q&A.):

  • Abstract for presentation only: 2-3 pages, 10-15 minutes presentation (not included in the proceedings)
  • Short papers: 6-8 pages, 10-15 minutes presentation
  • Full research papers: max. 10-14 pages, 20-25 minutes presentation
  • Call for papers: February 28, 2025
  • Preliminary submission deadline: 25 May, 2025
  • Camera-ready submission: 1 September 2025
  • Workshop days: between 8-9 September 2025
  • Notification of acceptance: July 14, 2025

The submissions need to adhere to the one-column CEUR template available here: CEUR, Overleaf.

Submissions need to be uploaded on EasyChair as a single pdf [here].

Submissions including semantic artefacts, methodologies, softwares, etc, need to adhere to the FAIR guidelines.

All contributions to JOWO workshops will be published in a joint CEUR proceedings volume, compare:

Venue

FOUST IX will be part of the Joint Ontology Workshops Episode XI (JOWO XI) hosted by the University of Catania.

Organization

Workshop Chairs

  • Mattia Fumagalli – Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
  • Adrien Barton – CNRS, IRIT (Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse)
  • Oliver Kutz – Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

Program Committee

  • Stay tuned!

Steering committee

  • Stefano Borgo – Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR, Trento, Italy
  • Oliver Kutz – Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
  • Frank Loebe – University of Leipzig, Germany
  • Fabian Neuhaus – Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Germany

Contact

E-mail:  foustworkshop@gmail.com