Fourth Annual Integrated Food Ontology Workshop (IFOW) at FOIS 2023 in Sherbrooke Quebec, July 17-20
Damion Dooley
This is a call for papers (or presentations only) to be presented at the fourth annual Integrated Food Ontology Workshop (IFOW) to be held as a half-day workshop at the Formal Ontology in Information Systems Conference (FOIS) 2023 in Sherbrook, Quebec July 17-20th , with the alternative option of a virtual paper presentation during a FOIS virtual-only conference scheduled for Sept 18-20th.
Motivated by FAIR data sharing mandates, academic, agricultural and public health agencies are adopting ontology in their research and data management and reporting infrastructure, often by way of emerging data sharing standards such as the Genomic Standards Consortium MIxS collection. It is one thing to have basic standardized term coverage of various food related domains – from organism anatomy and taxonomy, to food products, food safety properties, agricultural treatments, and food processing methods. The next generation of data harmonization occurs at a higher level of modeling – the standardized data structures for modelling plant and animal trait genomics, agricultural practices, food processing, nutritional analysis, contaminant exposure and diet, health and disease related research. What vocabulary, tool ecosystem and data models are needed to accomplish this modelling? This workshop seeks to define the coverage of the different ecological, agricultural, nutritional, dietary, public health, one health surveillance, food security, and trade domains that food-related ontologies are modelling, and the use of data translation tools for bringing legacy data into the ontology fold.
The workshop will have a paper presentation and discussion session, and a session focused on shorter flash presentations aimed at keeping up to date on ontology activity in the food space. We encourage submissions in all aforementioned areas, including:
- Ontology in agriculture and the environment (modelling of crop treatments, field studies, farm practice, biosample testing for nutrient content, and impact of fertilizers, pesticides and toxins).
- Ontology in nutrition and food science, technology, and engineering including food product biotransformation from fungi, and bacteria, and how they are taken in the body through dietary eating patterns, and nutrition, fermentation and metabolomic modelling.
- Ontologies and their applications: How the public and private sector are using food related ontologies in their research and operations: database integration, process analysis, tools for ontology building, quality metrics.
The workshop accepts:
- 1 page abstract required for 3-5 minute flash presentation
- 2 page abstract for 10-15 minute presentation only (no paper in conference proceedings)
- 6-14 page paper (including references) for presentation & paper in conference proceedings
Abstracts and paper submissions are done by way of the FOIS paper submission form and must meet FOIS guidelines, namely abstracts and papers must be in pdf format, with papers including a maximum 300 word abstract. IOS publisher paper templates are available for IOS MS Word and Latex. The submission form will ask to categorize your submission (selections: Foundational Issues / Methodological Issues / Ontology-based Applications / Domain Ontologies) but this selection is not essential.
Those who can make FOIS in person in Sherbrooke (July 17-20) can present in person; otherwise they will be scheduled to present at FOIS virtually Sept 18-20.
May 1: Deadline for presentation abstract and paper submission
June 1: Presentation / paper acceptance
June 15: Camera-ready deadline
July 17-20: (Exact date to be defined) In-person conference component (no virtual): Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada
Sept. 18-20: Virtual conference component