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! has now wrapped up! It was great to see and collaborate with all of you that brought an interest or a passion in food ontology!
We will post here links to video and slides as they become available.
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:
| Time | Session / Paper | Presenter / Authors |
| 9:30am – 11am | Food Ontology Development | Hosted by Michaela Kümpel |
| FoodOn Recipe Model 2.0 | Damion Dooley, Magalie Weber and Andrea Borghini | |
| Advancing food ontology integration: Linking intraspecific diversity and food composition data using Wikidata and FoodOn | Jenny 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 Waste | Hosted by Damion Dooley |
| A Participatory Design of Ontologies for Sustainability: The Case of Meat Systems | Giorgio A. Ubbiali, Matthew C. Lange and Andrea Borghini | |
| Towards an Ontology of Traceable Impact Management in the Food Supply Chain | Bart Gajderowicz, Mark Fox and Yongchao Gao | |
| Ontology for Food Process Side Stream Application | Sander van Leeuwen, Robbert Robbemond and Daoud Urdu | |
| 2:30pm – 4 pm | Food Ontology Development | Hosted by Andrea Borghini |
| Representing food waste in ontologies: A role-based account | Fumiaki Toyoshima, Adrien Barton and Damion Dooley | |
| FoodOn Update: A Scalable Template-Driven Seafood and Fungi Term Hierarchy to Manage Extensive Species Diversity – Abstract | Anoosha Sehar, Kai Blumberg, Damion Dooley and William Hsiao | |
| Human Verification of LLM-Powered Structured Data Extraction from Image Files | Katherine 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:
- https://foodon.org/icbo-2020-food-workshop/ Bolzano Italy
- https://foodon.org/ifow-2021-workshop/ Bolzano Italy
- https://foodon.org/ifow-2022-workshop/ Jönköping Sweden
- https://foodon.org/ifow-2023-workshop/ Sherbrooke Canada
- https://foodon.org/ifow-2024-workshop/ Enschede Netherlands
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
- March 11: 1st call for paper and presentation submissions
- June 14th: Submission deadline for full papers and for presentation 2 page abstracts. (The general FOIS Call for paper site is: https://easychair.org/cfp/fois2025)
- Submit your IFOW 2025 paper or presentation abstract to: https://easychair.org/conferences/submission_new?a=33948395 . (The general FOIS Paper submission link, https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=fois2025, should lead to a more general landing page after logging into Easychair. There one would select the “author” link, and then access the “New Submission” link.)
- June 21: author acceptance notification
- Sept 5: Final slide presentation submission
- Sept 9: IFOW workshop day
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 CLOSED.
Organizing Committee
| Damion Dooley damion_dooley@sfu.ca | Simon Fraser University (primary contact) |
| Michaela Kümpel | Universitaet Bremen |
| Robert Warren | Glengarry Agriculture and Forestry |
| Anoosha Sehar | Simon Fraser University |
| Felix Bindt | Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment |
| Ido Toxopeus | Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment |
| Larisa Soldatova | Goldsmiths University of London |
| Duccio Cavalieri | Università degli Studi di Firenze |
| Laurette Dube | McGill University |
| Miezah Ebenezer Kwofie | McGill University |
| Andrea Borghini | UMIL/Culinary Mind |
| Renata Guizzardi-Silva Souza | University of Twente |