IFOW 2024 Integrated Food Ontology Workshop, Enschede, Netherlands

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The submission deadline has now been extended to April 29th!

Announcing the fifth annual Integrated Food Ontology Workshop (IFOW), a half-day workshop at the Formal Ontology in Information Systems Conference (FOIS) 2024 at the University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands July 15-19th!

The application of ontologies to food systems involves a number of perspectives that altogether promise a more stable, permanent open-source vocabulary which can evolve incrementally to describe food system behaviour as it spans from ecosystem and anthropogenic source, to individual and population-level nutritional and socioeconomic import.  Philosophical discussion of food semantics helps to arrive at a consensus model/language of food materials, roles, dispositions, functions, and processes – a middle/upper-level ontology that we can all agree upon.  A technical / applied ontology perspective brings structure and tools for vocabulary curation, quality control, lookup, and reuse, as well as application focus on food related biosample collection, plant or animal breeding, robotics, industrial automation, etc.  A sociotechnical view wraps all of this work into a broader interdisciplinary “lingua franca of data science” effort to blend tangential domains of knowledge – from life science, animal and plant rearing, industrial and distribution infrastructure, food traceability, and regulatory management towards public and environmental health and security.  Our time of rapid change demands narratives that identify, anticipate and explain courses of action to alleviate hunger, food insecurity, environmental degradation and climate change, narratives that rely on ontologies to salvage learning by enabling precise integration and comparison of past and present food system research and production data.

IFOW has successfully run in the last 4 years, attracting 30-60 participants in person and online across the academic, government and industry spectrum who have a mandate in data sharing and/or research in agriculture, nutrition, consumer behaviour, food science, or public health sectors.  Past promotions highlight our topics:

Themes

  • Ontology in food entities and food processing, nutrition and food science, technology, and engineering
  • Ontology of agricultural production involving ecological and animal/plant rearing
  • Ontology of consumer behaviour regarding food
  • Food ontology applications
  • Ontology in regulatory practices and international trade and public health
  • AI enhanced curation of food research data
  • Using food ontologies to verify content generated by Large Language Models (LLMs)
  • Enhancing LLMs model explainability and sourcing using food ontologies
  • Improving food ontologies using content generated by LLMs
  • Fine tuning LLMs for the Food domain

Timeline

  • January 31: 1st call for paper and presentation submissions
  • April 17 April 29th: paper and presentation submission deadline
  • May 15: author acceptance notification
  • June 30: Camera-ready submission for paper (in post-conference proceedings)
  • July 12: Final slide presentation submission
  • July 15-19: Workshop day will be finalized within this range

Call for papers and presentations

We encourage presentations in person, but can make arrangements for presentations done remotely. In either case every accepted publication or presentation must be linked to one author registration (link to be defined). On-site facilities include Wifi and a projector. The workshop accepts:

  • Abstract for presentation only (no paper submission involved in conference proceedings, just a presentation slide deck is due on July 12): an abstract needs to include the string ” – Abstract” at the end of title. It should show us clearly and in some depth what you will be talking about. Options:
    • 1 page abstract required for 3-5 minute flash presentation.
    • 2 page abstract for 10-15 minute presentation.
  • Paper submission for presentation (10-15 minutes). Your paper can be included in the Joint Ontology Workshops (JOWO) portion of the FOIS conference proceedings published by CEUR.  (JOWO workshops are held in conjunction with the main FOIS conference). A paper should include an abstract that does not exceed 300 words. Options:
    • Short 5-9 page paper (including bibliography).
    • long paper from 10-14 pages (including bibliography). 
  • We are looking into potential for offering an abstract for poster to be included within FOIS’s poster gallery.

Submission of presentation abstracts or papers

The main FOIS conference also has other opportunities to spread tasty food semantics into a general audience with a call for ontology tutorials, tool and method demos etc.

Registration

The minimum in-person requirement is that attendees pay the FOIS workshop attendance fee.  The 2024 registration page is not up yet, but expectations may be guaged by last year’s registration page for “Workshops and online conference” section which includes access to any workshop (collectively known as the JOWO workshops).  FOIS shows an “online conference only” option but that only applies to FOIS, not the workshops like IFOW, which don’t have separate days for an online portion. Online access to IFOW happens during its FOIS assigned date, to be defined.

Organizing Committee

Damion Dooley damion_dooley@sfu.caSimon Fraser University (primary contact)
Michaela KümpelUniversitaet Bremen 
Georgeta BordeaLa Rochelle University
Robert WarrenGlengarry Agriculture and Forestry
Anoosha SeharSimon Fraser University
Matthew LangeIC-FOODS
Felix BindtDutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment
Ido ToxopeusDutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment