IFOW 2026 Integrated Food Ontology Workshop #7, Vitória, Brazil

at the 16th International Conference On Formal Ontology In Information Systems (FOIS 2026) September 21-25, 2026 in Vitória, Brazil.

Analyses of food system challenges increasingly venture beyond the immediate domains of food production, nutrition, and human health, into a One Health paradigm where the interactions between humans, animals, and the environment all add dimensions of complexity. This year’s Integrated Food Ontology Workshop seeks a dialogue about the application of ontologies at the intersection of One Health domains. In particular, we seek to explore how food system sustainability is affected by both direct food loss and waste and by impacts inherent in current food system technologies and practices. These include, for example, PFAS chemical soil contamination, microplastics, pesticides, fertilizers and emerging microbial treatments and production ecosystems; the use of non-/biodegradable plastics in packaging; the effects of plant breeding on food preservation and resilience to drought, heat, shifting growing seasons and disease pressures; as well as animal health considerations concerning livestock disease dynamics and welfare standards.

Assuming that relevant fields can be ontologically represented, how can we encourage research across different communities to use ontologies to represent entities and their relationships in biology, epidemiology, chemistry, land use, agricultural practices, climate analysis, consumer behaviour and ethical requirements, in ways that foster interoperability and interconnectedness? This touches on philosophical and sociotechnical topics ranging from top-level/upper-level ontology harmonisation, to the ontological design patterns for describing processes both at the microscopic biological and macroscopic socioeconomic and environmental scale.

Programme

TBD

Topics of Interest

Food system sustainability, which touches on many of the following topics
Agricultural production and contamination/remediation (PFAS, fertiliser, pesticide,…)
Food processing, recipe representations and food science
Nutrition, food safety, animal health and public health
Food security, international trade, traceability and regulatory practices
Food consumer behaviour – packaging, socioeconomics, …
Food system loss and waste
Improving food ontologies using content generated by LLMs; Using food ontologies to verify content generated by LLMs
Top and upper-level ontology alignment (BFO, DOLCE, UFO, COB, CCO, BORO …) for food, sustainability, and health

Background

IFOW has successfully run in the last 6 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. Our themes and topics are available in past promotions:

Timeline

3 June 2026 – Workshop paper and presentation submission deadline
15 July 2026 – Workshop paper and presentation author notification
31 July 2026 – Camera-ready submission
21-22 September 2026 – Workshop day TBD (co-located with FOIS 2026)

Submission Types

We welcome original anonymized submissions of the following types:

Papers:
- Full papers: not to exceed 13 pages (excluding references);
- Short papers: 5-9 pages (position papers, research-in-progress, practitioner reports);
- Paper abstracts should be no more than 300 words.
Abstracts, for presentation only:
- 2-3 pages (not included in the proceedings).

Initial paper submission should be provided in PDF version (whether prepared as MS Word or Latex document). All page limits exclude references.

Submission Instructions

Submissions must adhere to the one-column CEURART style, see details at Publishing at CEUR-WS.org. Templates are found at https://www.iospress.nl/service/authors/latex-and-word-tools-for-book-authors/ . A CEUR formatting validation script is now available at: https://github.com/johnbeve/ceur-precheck

Following CEUR-WS policy, authors must “declare and detail the specific contributions of any GenAI tools and services used in the preparation of their work.” https://ceur-ws.org/GenAI/Policy.html A section on “Declaration on Generative AI” is required following the template (even if to declare no generative AI tools have been employed).

Paper submissions, when open, must be made through Easychair https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=fois2026 by selecting “author”, “New Submission”, and the IFOW workshop (which will be listed as WS: IFOW).

Publication

Proceedings will be submitted to CEUR-WS.org for online Open Access publication in the JOWO 2026 volume in the IAOA series (http://ceur-ws.org/iaoa.html). This series is indexed by SCOPUS and DBLP. (For the previous editions of the JOWO proceedings, see https://www.iaoa.org/jowo/ )

After acceptance, the authors must submit the accepted paper for publication, including:

A PDF of the camera-ready version of the paper in the CEURART style (see link above);
A zip file containing the LaTeX source of the paper along with the required libraries for compilation (images, tables, references);
A signed author agreement (to be provided).

All items are required; missing items will cause the withdrawal of the paper.

At least one author of each accepted paper must register and participate in the workshop for the paper to be included in the proceedings. The editors reserve the right to exclude papers that are not presented.

Location

JOWO workshops are co-located with FOIS and will be held in the beautiful city of Vitória in the southeast of Brazil. https://foisconference.org/location/

Organizing Committee

Damion Dooley (damion_dooley@sfu.ca)	Simon Fraser University
Anoosha Sehar	Simon Fraser University
Dr. Michaela Kümpel	University of Bremen
Dr. Ludger Jansen	Philosophical-Theological College of Brixen/Bressanone
Dr. Giorgio Ubbiali	Philosophical-Theological College of Brixen/Bressanone
Dr. Andrea Borghini	University of Milan
Magalie Weber	Institut national de recherche pour l’agriculture, l’alimentation et l’environnement
Dr. Adrien Barton	Institut de recherche en informatique in Toulouse