IFOW 2025 Integrated Food Ontology Workshop, Catania, Italy on September 9th

Announcing the sixth annual full-day Integrated Food Ontology Workshop (IFOW) within the Joint Ontology Workshop (JOWO) programme of the Formal Ontology in Information Systems Conference (FOIS) 2025 at the University of Catania, Italy September 8th -12th!

The workshop will take place September 9th for a full day!

For virtual attendance, an MS Teams link will be provided here the day of the workshop!

Program

The general FOIS Workshop programme is here: https://www.dmi.unict.it/fois2025/?page_id=499 IFOW has finalized the presentation schedule into 3 sessions on September 9th:

TimeSession / PaperPresenter / Authors
9:30am
– 11am
Food Ontology DevelopmentHosted by Michaela Kümpel
FoodOn Recipe Model 2.0Damion Dooley, Magalie Weber and Andrea Borghini
Advancing food ontology integration: Linking intraspecific diversity and food composition data using Wikidata and FoodOnJenny Johana Gallo Franco, Sarah Brinkley, Marie-Angélique Laporte, Damion Dooley, Anoosha Sehar, Katherine Thornton, Kai Blumberg, Maya Rajasekharan and Selena Ahmed
ConsomON, an ontology for structuring knowledge and modeling consumer food behavior.Magalie Weber, Florian Duclos, Hervé Guillemin, Stéphane Dervaux, Julien Cufi and Michel Visalli
11:30am
– 1 pm
Traceability, Sustainability and Food WasteHosted by Damion Dooley
A Participatory Design of Ontologies for Sustainability: The Case of Meat SystemsGiorgio A. Ubbiali, Matthew C. Lange and Andrea Borghini
Towards an Ontology of Traceable Impact Management in the Food Supply ChainBart Gajderowicz, Mark Fox and Yongchao Gao
Ontology for Food Process Side Stream ApplicationSander van Leeuwen, Robbert Robbemond and Daoud Urdu
2:30pm
– 4 pm
Food Ontology DevelopmentHosted by Andrea Borghini
Representing food waste in ontologies: A role-based accountFumiaki Toyoshima, Adrien Barton and Damion Dooley
FoodOn Update: A Scalable Template-Driven Seafood and Fungi Term Hierarchy to Manage Extensive Species Diversity – AbstractAnoosha Sehar, Kai Blumberg, Damion Dooley and William Hsiao
Human Verification of LLM-Powered Structured Data Extraction from Image FilesKatherine Thornton, Kenneth Seals-Nutt, Mika Matsuzaki and Marcel Nguemaha

Location

Room A5 of the the Department of Human Sciences (DISUM) at the University of Catania. DISUM is located at the Benedictine Monastery of San Nicolò l’Arena in Piazza Dante Alighieri, 32, Catania, pinned in red on map below.

Workshop Announcement

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 5 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

The workshop accepts full papers for presentation as well as 10 minute presentation-only content aimed at keeping up to date on ontology activity in the food systems space. We encourage submissions in all aforementioned areas, including:

  • Ontology of agricultural production
  • Ontology in food entities and food processing, nutrition and food science, food safety, food security, food waste 
  • Ontology of food consumer behaviour
  • Food ontology applications including recipe representations
  • Ontology in regulatory practices and international trade and public health
  • Large Language Models (LLMs): Improving food ontologies using content generated by LLMs; Using food ontologies to verify content generated by LLMs; Fine tuning LLMs for the Food domain

Timeline

Submission of presentation abstracts or papers

Contributions to IFOW can be published in a joint open access CEUR proceedings volume (unless opting out), within the IAOA series at CEUR (http://ceur-ws.org/iaoa.html). 

Paper format requirements

Submitted papers must:

  • be 6 to 14 pages (including bibliography);
  • include an abstract of no more than 300 words;
  • be anonymized;
  • be submitted in the PDF format;
  • be formatted according to the CEUR formatting guidelines for regular or short paper (see “CEURART style section), which may be downloaded here. OpenOffice template in particular is here (MS Word is no longer supported).

Presentation abstract requirements

10 minute presentation abstracts should be described as a CEUR formatted abstract in 2 pages of text, anonymized, with references added on top of that.

Registration

FOIS registration is now OPEN.

Organizing Committee

Damion Dooley damion_dooley@sfu.caSimon Fraser University (primary contact)
Michaela KümpelUniversitaet Bremen 
Robert WarrenGlengarry Agriculture and Forestry
Anoosha SeharSimon Fraser University
Felix BindtDutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment
Ido ToxopeusDutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment
Larisa SoldatovaGoldsmiths University of London
Duccio CavalieriUniversità degli Studi di Firenze
Laurette DubeMcGill University
Miezah Ebenezer KwofieMcGill University
Andrea BorghiniUMIL/Culinary Mind
Renata Guizzardi-Silva SouzaUniversity of Twente