Dear colleagues,
We are pleased to invite submissions to the 10th Edition of the Foundational Ontology Workshop, as part of the 12th Joint Ontology Workshops (JOWO 2026), held at the 16th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS), in Vitória, ES, Brazil, on 21-25 September 2026.

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About the workshop:
Foundational Ontologies are attempts to systematise very high-level categories of thought or reality. In practical terms, they aim to understand and formalise the meaning of very general terms, such as object, event, property, time, quality, relation, and process. Once formalised, these terms provide the top-level categories that, in principle, are common to many (if not all) domains of application. Consequently, Foundational Ontologies are widely acknowledged as crucial tools for tackling system and software interoperability issues. Despite this recognition, there is less consensus on the specific entities a foundational ontology should cover, its organisational structure, its scope, and even its role in relation to more specialised domain ontologies. This lack of consensus often reflects deep-rooted debates stemming from different philosophical perspectives on reality, mind, and language.

Traditionally, FOUST concentrates on a series of topics in foundational ontology. This encompasses discussing philosophical foundations, presenting new research on specific foundational ontologies, discussing existing foundational ontologies, comparing them, and examining their relevance to the broader ontological enterprise. FOUST X also welcomes presentations of ongoing research and perspectives that encourage interdisciplinary dialogue among the diverse subfields of applied ontology.


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Submissions:
We welcome three types of submissions.
(i) Abstracts for presentation only: 2-3 pages (not included as a paper in the proceedings);
(ii) Short papers: 6-9 pages;
(iii) Full research papers: 10-14 pages.

Submissions must be submitted via EasyChair as a single PDF and formatted in CEUR 1-column format.
Template: https://ceurws.wordpress.com/2020/03/31/ceurws-publishes-ceurart-paper-style/
Submission link: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=fois2026
(Please select the track WS: FOUST)

Workshops will be submitted for open-access publication in a joint CEUR proceedings volume within the IAOA series at CEUR (http://ceur-ws.org/iaoa.html). This series is indexed by SCOPUS and DBLP.


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Website: https://foust.inf.unibz.it
Contact: foustworkshop@gmail.com
Workshop paper submission deadline: 3 June 2026
Workshop paper author notification: 15 July 2026
Camera-ready submission: 31 July 2026
Workshop days: between 21-25 September 2026 (co-located with FOIS 2026)

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We look forward to your submissions and welcome any questions.


Organisation:
Ludger Jansen – PTH Brixen College, Bressanone, Italy & University of Rostock, Germany
Dilek Yargan – FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure, Germany


Steering Committee:
Stefano Borgo - Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR, Trento, Italy
Oliver Kutz – Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy