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Ontology Summit 2025

Conceptualization, Analysis and Formalization

The Two Sides of Ontology: Relating ontologies to the world and to theories about the world

The Ontology Summit is an annual series of events that involves the ontology community and communities related to each year's theme chosen for the summit. The Ontology Summit was started by Ontolog and NIST, and the program has been co-organized by Ontolog and NIST along with the co-sponsorship of other organizations that are supportive of the Summit goals and objectives.

As part of Ontolog’s general advocacy to bring ontology science and related engineering into the mainstream, we endeavor to facilitate discussion and knowledge sharing amongst stakeholders and interested parties relevant to the use of ontologies. The results will be synthesized and summarized in the form of the Ontology Summit 2024 Communiqué, with expanded supporting material provided on the web and in journal articles.

Process and Deliverables

Similar to our last 19 summits, this Ontology Summit 2025 will consist of virtual discourse (over our archived mailing lists), virtual presentations and panel sessions as part of recorded video conference calls. As in prior years the intent is to provide some synthesis of ideas and draft a communiqué summarizing major points.

Meetings are at Noon US/Canada Eastern Time on Wednesdays and last about an hour. The sessions are Zoom Meetings.

Description

Schedule

We will begin with an Overview Session on Wednesday, 15 January 2025. This will be followed by a Keynote Address "Ontologies as specifications of conceptualizations: correctness, precision, and accuracy”. featuring Nicola Guarino on Wednesday, 22 January 2025. The summit will consist of four tracks as follows:

Track 1: Conceptualizing the theoretical form of reality

Track Chair: Gary Berg-Cross

  • Giancarlo Guizzardi
    • Title: "Semantics, Ontology, and Explanation."
  • Michael Gruninger
    • Title: The Heirs of Hilbert's Sixth Problem
    • Abstract: In an address to the International Congress on Mathematicians in 1900, David Hilbert posed twenty-three challenge problems, in areas ranging from logic to number theory and partial differential equations. These problems have had a profound impact on research in mathematics. However, the sixth problem posed by Hilbert has never been adequately addressed: ``Mathematical treatment of the axioms of physics: The investigations on the foundations of geometry suggest the problem: To treat in the same manner, by means of axioms, those physical sciences in which mathematics plays an important part." This talk will explore the ways in which ontologies are the axiomatic theories required by Hilbert as a solution to his Sixth Problem. It will also consider how the methodology for evaluating scientific theories can be applied to the problem of empirical evaluation of ontologies.
  • Barry Smith
    • Title: Models, theories and ontologies
    • In the paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.01560 Jobst Landgrebe and I outline the beginnings of on ontology of physics and mathematics from a BFO (= commonsensical) perspective. I will sketch how the ontologies of classical and modern physics relate to the ontology of common sense and of mathematics. In brief, classical physics inherits the common-sense view of nature, and uses mathematics to formalise our natural understanding of the causes and effects we observe in time and space when we select subsystems of nature for modelling. But in modern physics, we do not extend the realm of common sense by augmenting our knowledge of what is going on in nature. Rather, we have measurements that we do not understand, so we know nothing about the ontology of what we measure. We help ourselves by using entities from mathematics, which we do understand ontologically.
  • Ken Baclawski
    • Title: What is a Theory?
    • Abstract: There are many theories in the sciences, arts and humanities that are not always formal theories and yet can be valuable. In this talk, I will talk about the general notion of a theory and the relationship between less formal and more formal theories.

Track 2: Theoretical Knowledge and Reality

This track will cover a range of topics such as:

  • Philosophy - from phenomenology to the doctrine of being and of existence and theoretical knowledge
  • Theoretical knowledge - normative forms of presentation in various fields of activity
  • Criticism of definitions encountered in practice from the point of view of ontology engineering

Track 3: From Reality to Data

This track will cover a range of topics and questions such as:

  • Truthmakers; perception; situation awareness
  • Quality control of ontologies from the point of view of supporting theories
  • How can we make our devices and manipulators?
  • How can we use theoretical knowledge to create our measurement and other tools?
  • Data verbalization: any unit of data can be read out loud.
  • Data visualization

Track 4: Ontologies and Data

This track will cover a range of topics and questions such as:

  • What is the difference between an ontology and a mathematical theory?
  • Examples of ontologies with large amounts of instance data (e.g., ABox, KG)
    • How effective are these ontologies in practical situations?
    • Do the ontologies adequately support reasoning processes?
    • What trade-offs may have been considered?

Schedule

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