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.

The conference series Formal Ontology in Information Systems (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. FOIS began with the first meeting in Trento, Italy, in June 1998, which was followed by meetings in 2001, 2004, 2006, and 2008. The current, sixth FOIS conference is being held in Toronto, Canada, during 11–14 May 2010. In our call for papers, we solicited contributions from a wide range of areas important to the development of formal ontologies:

Foundational Issues

• Kinds of entity: particulars vs universals, continuants vs occurrents, abstracta vs concreta, dependent vs independent, natural vs artificial

• Formal relations: parthood, identity, connection, dependence, constitution, subsumption, instantiation

• Vagueness and granularity

• Identity and change

• Formal comparison among ontologies

• Ontology of physical reality (matter, space, time, motion, …)

• Ontology of biological reality (genes, proteins, cells, organisms, …)

• Ontology of artefacts, functions and roles

• Ontology of mental reality and agency (beliefs, intentions and other mental attitudes; emotions, …)

• Ontology of social reality (institutions, organizations, norms, social relationships, artistic expressions, …)

• Ontology of the information society (information, communication, meaning negotiation, …)

• Ontology and Natural Language Semantics, Ontology and Cognition

Methodologies and Applications

• Top-level vs application ontologies

• Ontology integration and alignment; role of reference ontologies

• Ontology-driven information systems design

• Ontology-based application systems

• Requirements engineering

• Knowledge engineering

• Knowledge management and organization

• Knowledge representation; Qualitative modeling

• Computational lexicons; Terminology

• Information retrieval; Question-answering

• Semantic web; Web services; Grid computing

• Domain-specific ontologies, especially for: Linguistics, Geography, Law, Library science, Biomedical science, E-business, Enterprise integration, …

Out of 71 papers submitted to FOIS-2010, 28 were selected for inclusion in the final programme, covering both the foundational issues and more application-oriented topics. Every submission was reviewed by at least two (and in almost every case by three) experts from the Programme Committee, together with a number of extra reviewers as listed below.

Many people have contributed to the success of FOIS-2010. First and foremost, of course, are the authors who responded to the call for papers, without whom there would have been no FOIS. We would like to thank the members of the Programme Committee for undertaking the reviewing work to a tight deadline, as well as the additional reviewers whose help was solicited where necessary. We are particularly grateful to our three invited speakers, Francis Jeffry Pelletier, John Bateman, and Alan Rector, whose contributions in themselves range across the whole spectrum of ontology from philosophical foundations to applications. We would like to thank the Conference Chair, Nicola Guarino, and the local chairs, Michael Grüninger and Chris Welty, for their indispensible handling of organizational aspects of the conference. Finally we must acknowledge the support of the newly-formed International Association for Ontology and its Applications, which from 2010 has taken over the general oversight and management of FOIS.

February 2010

Antony Galton, Riichiro Mizoguchi