Aims & Scope
In recent years, the dramatic growth of information and communication technologies has led to an increasingly interdisciplinary approach to research and development activities in these fields. To exploit the immense opportunities of widespread networks effectively, designers of modern information systems need to combine the precision of formal semantics with the needs of cognitive transparency, as they incorporate increasingly sophisticated and heterogeneous information content. The recent explosion of interest on ontologies is an important component of this trend. Researchers in disciplines such as knowledge engineering, information systems modeling, artificial intelligence, formal and computational linguistics, information retrieval, library science, and knowledge management have come to realize that a solid foundation for their research calls for serious work in ontology, understood as a general theory of the types of entities and relations that make up their respective domains of inquiry. In all these areas, attention has started to focus squarely on the content of information, rather than on just the formats and languages used to represent that content.
Applied Ontology focuses on information content in its broadest sense. As the subtitle makes clear, two broad kinds of content-based research activities are envisioned: ontological analysis and conceptual modeling. The former includes any attempt to investigate the nature and structure of a domain of interest using rigorous philosophical or logical tools; the latter concerns the cognitive and linguistic structures we use to model the world, as well as the various analysis tools and methodologies we adopt for producing useful computational models, such as information systems schemes or knowledge structures. Applied Ontology is the first journal with explicit and exclusive focus on ontological analysis and conceptual modeling under an interdisciplinary view. It aims to establish a unique niche in the realm of scientific journals by carefully avoiding unnecessary duplication with discipline-oriented journals. For this reason, authors will be encouraged to use language that will be intelligible also to those outside their specific sector of expertise, and the review process will be tailored to this end. For example, authors of theoretical contributions will be encouraged to show the relevance of their theory for applications, while authors of more technological papers will be encouraged to show the relevance of a well-founded theoretical perspective. Moreover, the journal will publish papers focusing on representation languages or algorithms only where these address relevant content issues, whether at the level of practical application or of theoretical understanding. Similarly, it will publish descriptions of tools or implemented systems only where a contribution to the practice of ontological analysis and conceptual modeling is clearly established.
Applied Ontology aims at being a major publication forum for theoretical and applied research in a variety of topics, tentatively grouped together in research areas, examples of which are indicated in the list below.
- Foundational issues • Philosophical foundations of ontology • Basic ontological categories and relations • Ontology, epistemology, and semiotics
- Specialized ontologies • Ontology of time, events and processes • Ontology of space and geography • Ontology of physics and physical objects • Ontology of biomedicine • Ontology of mental entities • Ontology of agents and actions • Ontology of organizations and social reality • Ontology of the information society • Ontology of business and e-commerce • Ontology of law • Ontology of history, culture and evolution
- Ontology development and ontology-driven conceptual modeling • Methodologies for ontology development • Impact of ontological analysis on current modeling practices • Best-practice examples and case studies
- Ontology management • Tools for ontology development, analysis and comparison • Comparison and evaluation of ontologies • Ontology management, maintenance, versioning • Methodologies for ontology merging, alignment, and integration • Semantic Web
- Ontology and language • Ontology and natural-language semantics • Ontology and lexical resources • Ontology and terminology • Ontology learning techniques and their evaluation • Role of ontology in natural-language systems
- Ontology, cognition, perception • Conceptual schemas, perceptual invariances and ontological categorization • Psychological experiments evaluating the cognitive adequacy of ontological categories
- Ontology and content standards • Library science • Knowledge organization • Museums and cultural repositories • Multimedia content • Product descriptions • Process and service descriptions • Biomedical and other scientific terminologies
- Innovative ontology-based applications
Editorial Board
Editors-in-Chief
John Bateman
Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Sciences
Bremen University, Bremen, Germany
Janna Hastings
Medical Knowledge and Decision Support
Institute for Implementation Science in Health Care
Faculty of Medicine, University of Zurich
and School of Medicine, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland
Founding Editors
Nicola Guarino
National Research Council Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technologies
(ISTC-CNR), Italy
Mark A. Musen
Stanford University
USA
Associate Editors
Philipp Cimiano
CITEC
University of Bielefeld, Germany
Giancarlo Guizzardi
University of Bolzano
Italy
Robert Hoehndorf
KAUST
Thuwal, Saudi Arabia
Leo Obrst
The MITRE Corporation
USA
Barry Smith
State University of New York at Buffalo
USA
Michael F. Uschold
Reinvent Technology
Canada
Laure Vieu
IRIT-CNRS
Toulouse, France
Editorial Board
João Paulo Almeida
Federal University of Espírito Santo
Brazil
Nathalie Aussenac-Gilles
Université Paul Sabatier
Toulouse, France
Adrien Barton
IRIT-CNRS
Toulouse, France
Brandon Bennett
University of Leeds
United Kingdom
Thomas Bittner
State University of New York at Buffalo
USA
Alex Borgida
Rutgers University
USA
Stefano Borgo
ISTC-CNR
Trento, Italy
Mathias Brochhausen
University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences
Little Rock, AR, USA
Boyan Brodaric
Natural Resources Canada
Ontario, Canada
Vinay Chaudhri
SRI International
USA
Christiane Fellbaum
Princeton University
USA
Roberta Ferrario
Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, National Research Council
Trento, Italy
Aldo Gangemi
ISTC-CNR
Rome, Italy
Pawel Garbacz
The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin
Poland
Yolanda Gil
University of Southern California
Marina del Rey, USA
Dagmar Gromann
University of Wien
Austria
Michael Gruninger
University of Toronto
Toronto, Canada
Torsten Hahmann
University of Maine
USA
Heinrich Herre
University of Leipzig
Germany
Pascal Hitzler
Kansas State University
Manhattan, KS, USA
Krzysztof Janowicz
University of California
Santa Barbara, USA
Ludger Jansen
Ruhr University of Bochum and University of Rostock
Germany
Paul Johannesson
Stockholm University
Sweden
Gilles Kassel
MIS Laboratory, Jules Verne University of Picardie
Amiens, France
Megan Katsumi
University of Toronto
Canada
Maria Keet
University of Cape Town
South Africa
Werner Kuhn
University of California
Santa Barbara, USA
Oliver Kutz
Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
Italy
Doug B. Lenat
Cycorp
Austin, USA
Claudio Masolo
ISTC-CNR
Trento, Italy
William E. McCarthy
Michigan State University
USA
Riichiro Mizoguchi
Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
Japan
Fabian Neuhaus
University of Magdeburg
Germany
Chris Partridge
BORO Solutions
London, United Kingdom
Maria Teresa Pazienza
University of Rome Tor Vergata
Italy
Daniele Porello
ISTC-CNR
Trento, Italy
Florian Probst
SAP Research
Darmstadt, Germany
Daniele Radicioni
University of Torino
Italy
Emilio Sanfilippo
University of Tours
France
Marco Schorlemmer
Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, IIIA-CSIC
Catalonia, Spain
Selja Seppälä
University College Cork
Ireland
Amit P. Sheth
Wright State University
Dayton, USA
Elena Simperl
University of Southampton
United Kingdom
Veda Storey
Georgia State University
Atlanta, USA
Hans Weigand
Tilburg University
The Netherlands
Bob Young
Loughborough University
United Kingdom
Assistant Editor
Mihai Pomarlan
Bremen University
Bremen, Germany
Author Guidelines
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Extra
Applied Ontology is affiliated with the International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA).
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