Ontology, originally a fundamental part of philosophical enquiry, is concerned with the analysis and categorization of what exists. The advent of complex information systems which rely on robust and coherent formal representations of their subject matter has led to a renewed focus on ontological enquiry, and the systematic study of such representations are at the center of the modern discipline of formal ontology. This is now a research focus in domains as diverse as conceptual modeling, database design, software engineering, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, the life sciences, bioinformatics, geographic information science, knowledge engineering, information retrieval and the semantic web.
This book presents the proceedings of the 9th edition of the Formal Ontology in Information Systems conference (FOIS 2016) held in Annecy, France, in July 2016. It contains the 25 full papers delivered at the conference (an acceptance rate of 30.9% for the main track), as well as the abstracts of the 3 keynotes by Gilberto Câmara, Stephen Mumford and Friederike Moltmann. The remainder of the book is divided into the sections: Foundations; Space, Time and Change; Cognition, Language and Semantics; Empiricism and Measurement; Ontology for Engineering; Biomedical Ontologies; and Ontology of Social Reality.
The domains addressed by the papers include geography, biomedicine, economics, social reality and engineering, and the book will be of interest to all those working in these fields, as well as to anybody with an interest in formal ontology.