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Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS '04) - Dnyanesh Rajpathak

Dnyanesh Rajpathak, Wednesday 10 November 2004 | Annotate

Dnyanesh Rajpathak has recently attended the International Conference of Formal Ontology in Information Systems hosted in Torino, Italy (Nov. 04-06, 2004) to present a paper titled "An Ontological Formalization of the Planning Task", jointly authored with Prof. Enrico Motta. In this FOIS conference only 28 papers being accepted out of 68 papers were submitted. The main purpose of the FOIS conference is to provide a forum for genuine interdisciplinary exchange in the spirit of a unified ontological analysis effort. Researchers in such areas as artificial intelligence, formal and computational linguistics, biomedical informatics, conceptual modelling, knowledge engineering and information retrieval have exchanged a solid foundation for their research calls for serious work in ontology, to understand a general theory of the types of entities and relations that make up their respective domains of inquiry. Key note speakers included, Amie L. Thomasson: Methods of Categorization and Peter Gärdenfors: How to Make the Semantic Web More Semantic. Planning is one of the oldest researched areas in Artificial Intelligence. And as the title of the paper suggest the main aim of this paper is to propose a generic task ontology, which formalizes the space of planning problems without subscribing to any application domain of planning or the way planning task can be solved. Finally, in addition to producing a formal specification we have also operationalized the ontology into a set of executable definitions, which provide a concrete reusable resource for knowledge acquisition and system development in planning applications.