Ontology Showcase

Submission deadline: 25 May 2025
Questions to: showcase-fois2025@easychair.org

Definition and scope

While a variety of ontologies from a wide range of domains is being developed in the Applied Ontology community, lack of awareness about them may lead to  ontology silos, hindering opportunities for synergy and collaboration.The Ontology Showcase at FOIS gives authors the opportunity to present their ongoing work to receive early feedback from the community as well as published work promoting collaboration among ongoing and mature projects. This initiative encourages sharing and reuse of curated high-quality ontologies.

Location and format

Following the same format of the main conference, the FOIS 2025 ontology showcase will consist of both a virtual session (online only, to be held on 4-5 September 2025) and an onsite session (in-person only, to be held in Catania on 8-12 September 2025). Upon submission, authors must indicate their preference and constraints concerning virtual or onsite presentation. Acceptance will be either for virtual or onsite presentation, at which time authors can no longer change the modality.

We encourage the authors to submit their ontologies to the onsite session in Catania, which will consist of a series of presentations of the accepted ontologies and an interactive panel discussion with authors and invited experts. Presentations that include live demos showing the ontology use in practical settings are most welcome. Authors that are unable to showcase their ontology in-person, may present their work remotely (if indicated during submission).

The program committee will select the best ontology showcase submission (limited to unpublished work) to receive the “FOIS 2025 Best Ontology Showcase Paper” (see submission guidelines for overall evaluation criteria).

Important dates

  • Paper submission: 25 May 2025 1 June 2025
  • Notification of acceptance: 30 June 2025
  • Online conference:  4-5 September 2025
  • Onsite conference (Catania):  8-12 September 2025
  • Camera-ready version: 1 September 2025

Differentiation from the main track

If an ontology is the result of a mature work and provides a solid scientific contribution in terms of, e.g., requirements, foundational issues, methodology, design choices, application or evaluation, then it may be suitable to be submitted to the domain ontology track of the main conference as a full research paper (max 14 pages) that will be published by IOS Press.  

The ontology showcase is a practical track aimed at stimulating the community to share their ontologies, make them more visible and get (early) feedback, even if their development is still an ongoing or early work that does not provide a mature scientific contribution suitable to be submitted (yet) to the main track. The ontology showcase provides authors with the opportunity to describe their ontology to be published as CEUR proceedings. Live demos that show the use of the accepted ontologies in practical settings are most welcome during the conference (online and onsite).

Submission types

Two modalities can be submitted to ontology showcase:

  1. The unpublished ontologies: Authors can submit articles vary from 5 to 14 pages (including bibliography).
  2. Published work is welcomed: Authors can submit an extended 2 pager abstract (bibliography not included) to summarize their published work. The extended abstract must contain a link to the published work. The title must start with ‘Abstract :’.

Both submission modalities should comply with submission guidelines described in the next section. At a minimum, papers must contain a description of the ontology, show the technical quality of the ontology and how other existing ontologies/design patterns have been (or are planned to be) reused, clearly state the added value of the ontology compared to existing work and provide evidence of adoption by a community (academic, industrial) that is using it (or that potentially will benefit from it).

Submission guidelines

Submissions should provide an overview of the ontology addressing the following questions as much as possible:

  • What is the domain represented by the ontology?
  • What is the added value that the ontology provides for the intended domain/community?
    • Who are the ontology’s intended end users (e.g., industrial or academic community, end users)?
  • Which methodology is adopted for the development of the ontology?
  • Are there other ontologies within the same domain? How do they compare to the ontology being showcased?
  • What other ontologies are reused?
  • What are the requirements/use cases that drove the ontology development?
    • How is the ontology being used (e.g., search, question answering, semantic integration)?
  • How is the ontology populated?
    • Are existing datasets reused?
  • How was the ontology evaluated?
  • Does the ontology comply to FAIR guidelines (e.g., available in a public repository, accessible at a persistent URI and include proper metadata)?
  • What are the sustainability plans (e.g., beyond a project) for the ontology? Who is the maintainer (e.g., a person/single maintainer, an organization, a group of organizations, a standardization body)?
  • Were there any interesting modelling challenges that had to be overcome?

Submissions must:

  • Respect the aforementioned page limits
  • Be submitted non-anonymously in PDF
  • Comply with the 1-column CEUR-ART style
  • Comply with the FAIR guideline outlined here. Papers that are not FAIR enough according to these guidelines will be only conditionally accepted, pending the fulfillment of the FAIR requirements.
  • Clearly indicate the mode of participation (online or in-person). Acceptance will be either for the in-person presentation or for online presentation, at which time authors can no longer change the modality

Click here to submit your paper via EasyChair. Please select the track “Ontology Showcase”.

Authors of accepted papers are also encouraged to present a poster of their ontology during the conference. The poster (max format A0) should contain a compact description of the ontology, mention other ontologies/patterns being reused, highlight its purpose and added value, explicitly mention by which users/community is the ontology being used, who is its maintainer and provide the link to its publication page.

Publication

Accepted papers will be published in a joint CEUR proceedings volume in the IAOA series. In order to be published in the proceeding, an  extended abstract of a published work must have less than 20% overlap[DS1] [DS2]  with the existing publication.

Participation

At least one author of each accepted paper must register to FOIS 2025 at “presenter rate” according to the selected modality (in-person or online).

Organization

Chairs

  • Asiyah Lin, OntoData Research and Solutions LLC., United States of America
  • Veruska Zamborlini, Federal University of Espírito Santo, Brazil and KNAW, Humanities Cluster, Netherlands

Program Committee

  • Adrien Barton           IRIT & CNRS, France
  • Bart Gajderowicz        University of Toronto, Canada
  • Evellin Cardoso         Federal University of Goiás, Brazil
  • Fred Freitas            Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil
  • Giacomo De Colle        University at Buffalo
  • João Luiz Moreira       University of Twente, The Netherlands
  • João Paulo A. Almeida   Federal University of Espírito Santo, Brazil
  • Mauro Dragoni           Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), Italy    
  • Mike Bennett            Hypercube
  • Robert Pergl            Czech Technical University, Czech Republic
  • Rodrigo Calhau          Federal Institute of Espírito Santo, Brazil
  • Sergio de Cesare        University of Westminster, UK    
  • Torsten Hahmann         University of Maine, USA

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