ISAO Summer School 2023 - FOIS 2023 conference

The full program for the ISAO 2023 Summer School is available.

July 10-14, 2023
Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada

Faculté des sciences de l'Université de Sherbrooke

The Interdisciplinary School on Applied Ontology (ISAO) is the premier educational forum for acquiring and deepening knowledge in ontology – its foundations, applications, and interconnections with related areas.

Target audience

PhD students
PostDocs and researchers
Ontologists from business, industry and society

Leading experts in applied ontology (AO), formal ontology, modeling, semantics and neighboring fields teach various basic courses as well as engage in interactive formats for deepening the knowledge of all participants, providing a full immersion experience in AO for all levels of expertise. As yet, facilitators include Michael Gruniger, Giancarlo Guizzardi, Robert Hoehndorf, Maria Keet, and Barry Smith (more info below).

Important Dates and Schedule

(as of mid of May 2023, possibly subject to minor changes in details)

Registration open: May 1, 2023
Early registration ends: June 11, 2023 (UTC-4)
Late registration ends: July 11, 2023
Event on July 10-14
- approximately 3 days (July 10-12/13) of courses (rather introductory)
- approximately 2 days (July 13-14) of interactive formats (introductory to advanced)

Program Content

Ontological Analysis

[Nicola Guarino, Giancarlo Guizzardi]

Methods of formal ontological analysis
Top-level ontological distinctions, categories and relations
Foundational ontologies
OntoUML hands-on

Introduction to the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO)

[Barry Smith]

Self-contained tutorial
Shared session with the EINS summer school

Logical Foundations

[Michael Gruninger, Oliver Kutz]

Introductory
- Writing first-order logic (FOL) sentences
- Proofs and models
- Description logics (DLs), incl. relations to the Semantic Web
Advanced
- Ontology verification
- Concept combination, debugging, weakening in DL

Cognitive Aspects and Ontology

[Nicola Guarino, Giancarlo Guizzardi, Oliver Kutz]

Conceptual modeling and applied ontology
Concepts in cognitive science, semantics and philosophy

Methods and Applications

[Robert Hoehndorf, Maria Keet, Asiyah Yu Lin]

Methods
- Developing good ontologies
- Building ontologies hands-on
- Machine learning/neuro-symbolic AI, semantic similarity and ont.
- Ontology reviewing
Applications
- Introduction to biomedical ontologies and their use
- Bio-ontology tool demonstration
- Ontology-based data access

Special Session

What are good applied ontology papers? (panel)

Social Program

Social dinner
Excursion
Pub quiz

Facilitators

Michael Gruninger, Semantic Technologies Lab, Toronto, Canada
Nicola Guarino, Laboratory for Applied Ontology (LOA), ISTC-CNR, Trento, Italy
Giancarlo Guizzardi, Semantics, Cybersecurity and Services, University of Twente, Netherlands
Robert Hoehndorf, Bio-Ontology Research Group, KAUST, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia
Maria Keet, Knowledge Engineering, Cape Town, South Africa
Oliver Kutz, Cognitive and Conceptual Modeling Research Group, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
Asiyah Yu Lin, Office of Data Science and Emerging Technologies, NIAID, NIH, Rockville, Maryland, United States
Barry Smith, Department of Philosophy, University at Buffalo and National Center for Ontological Research, Buffalo, United States

Fee Schedule

Letter of invitation

To request a letter of invitation for ISAO 2023, not at least prior to registration, please email us at fois.2023@usherbrooke.ca and include your full postal work address.

Following receipt of your request, please allow 3 business days for a response.

Associated events

Co-located with and

preceding FOIS 2023 (the International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems held from July 17-20 in person and September 18-20 online)
sharing selected sessions with EINS 2023 (the first Interdisciplinary Summer School in Digital Health)
(École d’été interdisciplinaire en numérique de la santé; primarily in French)

Complementing ESAO, the Educational Series of Applied Ontology, a continuous series of virtual educational sessions.

Venue

See details on the page Venue.

Contact

For more information, please send an email to iaoa.isao2023@gmail.com

Organization

The ISAO series is run by the International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA) and is held jointly with FOIS every two years, typically in the week just before. ISAO 2023 is the 5th instance, after 2012/14/16/18 and 5 years of an undesired gap, and hosted by the University of Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada.

Thanks to local organization support in 2023 by