Actions

Ontolog Forum

IAOA Executive Council Election, 2012

[ Events and Time-table ]

[ Terms of Reference ]

[ Process Details ]

[ Q & A and Clarifications ]

[ List of Nominations ]

[ List of Candidates ]

[ Candidates and their Position Statements ]

[ Election Results ]

Events and Time-table

  • Announcement (by the IAOA President) of Assembly and Election Process: June 19, 2012
  • Nomination and Discussion opens: June 19, 2012
  • Nomination closes: July 8, 2012
  • Campaigning by candidates: starts from July 9, 2012 upon completion of the nomination-verification-acceptance of a candidate
  • Campaigning and Discussion closes: July 15, 2012
  • IAOA Assembly called to order (by the IAOA President): July 16, 2012
  • Candidates list and other ballot items published: July 16, 2012
  • Ballot opens: 00:01, July 16, 2012 (Monday, CEST)
  • Ballot closes: midnight, July 20, 2012 (Friday, CEST)
  • Announcement of election results: July 24, 2012
  • The Assembly will culminate in a face-to-face meeting (remote attendance supported) during FOIS in Graz, Austria, on July 25, 2012
  • New Executive Council takes office: January 1, 2013

Terms of Reference

Please refer to the IAOA Statute (especially Clause 19 regarding the Executive Council), and the Provisional IAOA ByLaws (especially Article VII in regard t the Election of Councillors.)

Process Details

Nomination: June 19 - July 8, 2012

  • Starting from June 19, 2012 you can nominate and second any individual (excluding yourself) as a candidate for membership in the next IAOA Executive Council (EC).
  • While any person who is a current member of IAOA may nominate or second a nomination (excluding self), only an individual who is verified as an IAOA member in good standing since 2011, may be a proper candidate to go on the ballot. Note that this is in accordance with the message above (http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/iaoa-member/2012-06/msg00000.html), which states that the 2012 Election will be held according to the rules encoded in the preliminary, bootstrap version of the Bylaws at http://iaoa.org/resources/IAOA-ByLaws-V1_2.pdf, which has been just adopted by the EC according to the Statute, and which will be subject itself to your approval at the IAOA Ordinary Assembly July 16-20, 2012.
  • To make a nomination, send an email to the [iaoa-member] mailing list <iaoa-member@ontolog.cim3.net> (if you are already an IAOA member) AND cc the Election Committee mailing list <iaoa-election@ontolog.cim3.net> providing:
    • (A) your name/affiliation/email-address,
    • (B) the nominee's name/affiliation/email-address, and
    • (C) a citation stating why your nominee would make a good candidate for the IAOA EC.
  • To second the nomination, send an email to the [iaoa-member] mailing list <iaoa-member@ontolog.cim3.net> AND cc the Election Committee mailing list <iaoa-election@ontolog.cim3.net> providing the name of the nominee you are seconding.
  • The individual making a nomination (and those who second the nomination) should be responsible for communicating with the nominee, see to it that the nominee meets the membership requirement, and get the nominee to send his/her acceptance (on the nomination, seconding, and candidacy) to the Election Committee in writing (via email to <iaoa-election@ontolog.cim3.net>).
  • The nomination period closes at midnight July 8, 2012 (CEST).

Campaigning and discussion: July 9 - July 15, 2012

  • Once a nominee has been verified to be a member in good standing for at least one year, and has accepted the nomination, and the nomination has been seconded, he/she should send to the [iaoa-member] mailing list <iaoa-member@ontolog.cim3.net> AND cc the Election Committee mailing list <iaoa-election@ontolog.cim3.net>:
    • a brief "position statement" (between 200~250 words) describing his/her view on the Association, goals as Executive Committee (EC) members, activities they want to pursue if elected, ... etc.
    • this statement will accompany the candidate's listing when the list of all candidates on the ballot are published prior to voting
  • after that, the candidate can start his/her campaign activities on the [iaoa-member] mailing list <iaoa-member@ontolog.cim3.net>.
  • Candidates are encouraged to make position statements and plans they have if elected to the EC.
  • Other IAOA Members are invited to ask questions, seek clarifications on the candidates' plans etc.
  • Other items to be voted on by the Assembly will also be introduced and discussed during this period.
  • The mailing list is not moderated and IAOA members are encouraged to interact freely.
  • Campaigning and discussion will close on midnight July 15, 2012 (CEST).

Official start of the 2012 IAOA Assembly: July 16, 2012

  • The President shall call the Assembly to order (virtually, in an email message), and publish the list of candidates that may be elected to the next IAOA Executive Council membership, along with other items that will be on the (electronic) ballot.
  • All members are expected to respond to this message to confirm their presence at this virtual assembly (as we will need to satisfy the quorum requirement, as stipulated in the IAOA Statute.)
  • Any error or discrepancy found on the published list should be reflected to the IAOA President and the Election Committee on the same day (July 16) for rectification.

Ballot: July 16 - July 20, 2012

  • IAOA members can vote online from 00:01, July 16 till midnight, July 20, 2012 (CEST).
  • The web address and access details will be distributed before the opening of the ballot.
  • Each member can cast one vote on each topic.
  • A vote for the IAOA EC means the selection of up to 9 members from the list of candidates.
  • A vote for an item means the selection of one among the provided options for that item.
  • All votes are anonymous.
  • A member may cast his/her electronic vote by going to IAOA member's area: http://iaoa.org/members/members.php and then to the member's utilities area: http://iaoa.org/members/utilities/utilities.html.
    • You will need your membership password to get into the voting site
    • if you lost your password, go to https://secure.iaoa.org/users/edit-user-pw_reset.php. If there is additional trouble with your authentication, write the Election Committee <iaoa-election@ontolog.cim3.net> for help.

Voting outcome

  • Immediately after voting is closed at midnight July 20, 2012 (CEST), raw results of the votes will be available by going to IAOA member's area: http://iaoa.org/members/members.php and then to the member's utilities area.
    • Note that these are only "raw" votes ... official election and ballot outcome will need to be confirmed based on quorum and other requirements, and will need to be announced later.
  • The 9 members that receive more votes among the candidates for the EC are elected and will form the new IAOA EC.
  • In case of a tie, the length of continuous membership by candidates in the Association will be taken into account, with longer membership ranking higher. If there is still a tie, then age will be used to break the tie, with younger candidates taking priority.
  • The members that are elected will form the new IAOA Executive Committee and will take office on January 1, 2013.
  • Unless we run into complications (such as quorum requirement issues, etc.) where a second call or a second quote may be necessary (and in which case the schedule will likely be delayed), the outcome of the voting will be officially announced to the [iaoa-member] mailing list by July 24, 2012.
  • Any and all report of concern (including especially, complaint and/or objection) to the officially announced voting results should be brought to the attention of the Election Committee in writing (via email to <iaoa-election@ontolog.cim3.net>) within 48 hours of the official announcement. Each item of concern received will be individually and openly handled. Past this window, no further report of this nature on the matter will be considered.

Q & A and Clarifications

  • ... (to be added as they arise!)
  • Question: Since only IAOA members may vote, when (before what date) must I join IAOA to be able to vote in this Election?
    • Answer: ... correct, only IAOA members may vote in this Election. Only IAOA members in good standing by July 12 will have access to the electronic ballot.
  • Question: What is quorum for the Assembly where this EC Election is held? Please also clarify when and how should members 'confirm their presence' in the Assembly so as to be properly recognized in the quorum count.
    • Answer: According to the IAOA Statute (clause 18) the Assembly is validly constituted by the presence of half plus one of the Membership. Your presence will be counted if you are a member of IAOA and you cast your electronic vote directly between 16 July and 20 July, 2012.
  • Question: What is the term of office for the newly elected IAOA Executive Council (EC)?
    • Answer: it will be 2 years, as recorded in Article 19 of the Statute.
  • Question: What should I do if I have questions (not covered here) or run into problems with the Election or voting process?
    • Answer: just send a message to the Election Committee (via email to <iaoa-election@ontolog.cim3.net>), stating clearly who you are, and what is the issue (please also provide some context where applicable) ... we will try to respond to you promptly.

List of Nominations

List of Candidates

( as of end 08-July-2012, the closing of nomination )

... Currently: Twelve (12) nominees and 12 candidates to fill Nine (9) elected positions in the next IAOA Executive Council (EC):

Candidates and their Position Statements

[ Ken Baclawski ]

[ John Bateman ]

[ Stefano Borgo ]

[ Michael Gruninger ]

[ Giancarlo Guizzardi ]

[ Ali Hashemi ]

[ Oliver Kutz ]

[ Frank Loebe ]

[ Fabian Neuhaus ]

[ Leo Obrst ]

[ Luc Schneider ]

[ Laure Vieu ]

I have been involved in metadata management since 1970, and ontologies

since 1994. I was part of the DAML program that developed the Semantic Web. My specific role in DAML was to establish connections with existing technologies, such as relational databases and UML. I am currently in the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University where I engage in research on ontology-based methods for software engineering and software modeling, especially in biology and medicine.

I have been active in many computer-related organizations and

communities, such as the ACM, IEEE, OMG, OASIS, and Ontolog Forum, serving in a variety of capacities such as Board Member, Secretary, Treasurer, Chair, and Chapter President. I strongly support the IAOA and its mission to promote research and application of ontologies.

If elected to the Executive Council, I would focus on these issues:
(1) Being an educator as well as having written a textbook on

ontologies, I consider education about, and publicity for, ontologies to be a critical issue for the ontology community.

(2) Since wide-spread acceptance of new technologies has always been

dependent on the easy availability of suitable tools, it is important to promote the development of open-source projects that manage and utilize ontologies. However, large numbers of unrelated and incompatible efforts that are attempting to solve the same or similar problems can be counter-productive. Accordingly, it is also important to foster cooperation and coordination among ontology-related efforts as well as between academia and industry. The IAOA is well positioned to take a leading role in this endeavor.

I've been involved in ontologies on and off since 1989, when we started

documenting the Penman Upper Model used as a knowledge-based interface in the Penman text generation system at ISI in Los Angeles and discussing its potential application as a general upper level ontology for various domains. Most recently, I have been the vice-president of the IAOA in the outgoing executive council since the first elections that we held in 2010. Between the two, I've worked on ontologies in many application areas, spanning natural language processing, spatial cognition, domotics, travel services, geographic information, health services, and assisted living, and have come to focus increasingly on how to construct modular ontologies that allow accommodation of different, and not necessarily mutually compatible, perspectives on the worlds being modelled.

Over this time spent with ontologies I've seen the study and use of

ontology come and go in popularity and fashionability. The current high degree of interest comes largely from areas of ontology that are less central to the concerns of the IAOA: that is, lite ontologies with weak axiomatisation that may be built relatively quickly from mass data. Although much can be done with such ontologies, I see these as only scratching the surface of what can and should be done with formal computational ontology. Thus, one of the aims that I believe IAOA should pursue is looking for real use cases where the additional effort and investment that is required for relatively well-formalised detailed ontologies can be shown to pay off. Working towards this within the IAOA, I'm engaged with two SIGs (the Design SIG and the Geospatial Semantics SIG) and, together with Michael Gruninger, have been pursuing a standardisation activity liason group and an ontology repository liason group. I see IAOA as providing an organisational structure within which interactions central to many areas of ontology work such as these can be supported and developed further and will continue to support this as far as possible. While we have come a long way in establishing the IAOA as a professional organisation for formal ontology, there is much left to do. I also think, however, that it is a good time for other members to take this further. Hence, my main reason for standing for re-election is to help provide some continuity in the Executive Council should this be desired.

I've served the EC (for a period also as Secretary) in these first years of our Association.

During this period I helped the EC to organize the Association and in particular to prepare the Statute and then the Bylaws with the parallel revision of the Statute. I believe an Association needs clear principles and rules to operate properly and to keep its focus. My hope is that now the Association is strong on this side and only occasional adjustments will be needed (here we are all learning by doing).

I'm happy to see that the number of members we have today is much higher than what expected when we started just a few years ago. This shows we have been moving in the right direction. With these numbers, we now need to pay more attention to the relationships among the IAOA officers and the members as well as among the members themselves. That is, I think it is time to strengthen the IAOA as a community. Newsletter, event reports, bulletin boards, opportunities for students, dedicated meetings... we can and should experiment with topics and modalities to actively interact.
I'm interested in continuing serving the IAOA EC in particular to strengthen the IAOA on this aspect if elected (... and will be available to help if not).
The International Association of Ontology and its Applications is situated amongst a unique confluence of disciplines. Herein lies our strength as well as many challenges. Although we are enriched by contributions from areas as diverse as philosophy,computer science, logic, and linguistics, we must also ensure that our field matures into a full-fledged discipline of its own.
My research over the past 18 years has focused on the logical foundations of ontology design and analysis and its application to enterprise modelling, manufacturing, web services, and process ontologies. Over this period of time, I have seen the field of applied ontology grow in both technical depth and diversity of applications. Nevertheless, many of our efforts have been hampered by a lack of coordinated efforts of a coherent research community. I believe that the IAOA can assist in establishing the study of applied ontology as a rigorous scientific and engineering discipline by fostering the development of a body of knowledge for the design, evaluation, and implementation of ontologies.
To achieve this goal, we must engage the academic and industrial communities to strike a balance between theoretical foundations and real-world applications. Many fruitful interactions can be expected between applied ontology and the standards communities, including such international bodies such as ISO, W3C, and OMG. As an elected member of the Executive Council of IAOA for the past two years, I have served as the Chair of the two Technical Committees (Standardisation Coordination and Ontology Repositories) which best support these objectives.
We also need to engage related research communities, such as the semantic web, knowledge representation, bioinformatics, and e-science. The activities of the IAOA can foster more collaboration and dissemination of research to ensure that contributions to applied ontology are recognized, shared, and reused. Through my involvement with all of the Ontology Summits, I have seen the tremendous benefit of building bridges between communities.
The activities of IAOA provide us with the opportunity to shape the young interdisciplinary research discipline of applied ontology. As a member of the Executive Council of the IAOA, I will work tirelessly to fulfill this vision.
I have been conducting research on Foundational Ontologies, Ontology Engineering and Ontology-Driven Conceptual Modeling for the past 15 years in different international institutions such as the University of Twente, in The Netherlands, and the Laboratory of Applied Ontology (LOA), in Trento, Italy. Currently, I am an associate professor and research lead at the Ontology and Conceptual Modeling Research Group (NEMO), in Vitória, Brazil. In addition to my academic activities, I have worked in a number of ontology knowledge transfer initiatives in sectors such as Digital Journalism, Petroleum and Gas, Telecommunications and Government. Recently, I had the honor to chair with Michael Gruninger and Maureen Donnelly the 7th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2012). Finally, for the past two years, I have been an elected member of the Executive Council of the IAOA.
IAOA was created to promote interdisciplinary community dialogues which are essential for developing a mature research area of Ontology and its Applications. One of my key objectives as an EC member is to continue to contribute to the association with the promotion of interdisciplinary research, connecting subject areas that can contribute to Ontology Research, as well as application areas which can benefit from it. In particular, I would like to continue to contribute to strengthen the dialogs between the ontology community and the areas of Conceptual Modeling, Databases, Information Science and Enterprise Computing. In the past two years, I have co-founded (with Yair Wand and Oscar Pastor) the IAOA Special Interest Group (SIG) on Ontologies and Conceptual Modeling. In addition, in the past years, I have actively promoted the dissemination of Formal Ontology and Ontology Engineering in these areas by talking at scientific venues of excellence in the areas of Conceptual Modeling and Information Systems Engineering (e.g., ER 2009, EDOC 2010, CAISE 2012), as well as international venues discussing policies and strategies for semantic interoperability (e.g., the UNDP International Forum on Government Interoperability Frameworks).
IAOA was created to promote ontology research and education in a truly international community. In that spirit, I would like to continue to contribute to the association's true internationalization. By that I mean to contribute to the expansion of its presence and relevance to national communities in different geographical regions. As the maturity of the area increases, Ontology Engineering should be more and more discussed in a level of undergraduate education as well in industrial and government settings. Especially in these scenarios, local representations of the association (e.g., national chapters) could play a fundamental role in promoting events, producing literature and adapting education to peculiarities and challenges of these specific environments. In my current term at the IAOA Executive Council, I have co-chaired (with Riichiro Mizoguchi) the IAOA International Outreach committee. In that role, I have focused on the promotion of the association and its goals in Latin America contributing to a number of relevant results. In particular, in the past two years, together with a number of very active and enthusiastic Brazilian professors, we have contributed to the unification of a number of community-specific events in a much stronger and active regional scientific venue. This event has now an average participation of more than 100 people, ranging from undergraduate students to full researchers, but also with a constant presence of industry and government professionals, and the encouraging prospects of increasingly including other latin-american research communities. This event affords ontology education in regional language and a scientific discussion which also addresses region-specific challenges. Moreover, it enables the contact between young researchers and invited internationally renowned researchers in the field. I believe that the lessons learned there can be used in establishing similar initiatives in different regions.
In summary, it has been an honor to contribute to the IAOA goals working in the Executive Council among some of my scientific heroes. If you give me the opportunity, I would like to tirelessly contribute to this young but ever more exciting area of Applied Ontology helping to promote a continuity of this work.
I discovered ontology relatively recently - in 2006, as an undergraduate Engineering Science student. I've been drawn to its potential to transform much of our world ever since, and it has been exciting to see this field mature.
As part of my technical contributions to the field, I helped design and develop some of the core principles of COLORE, and the theory behind decomposing ontologies into well-understood, simpler component theories. My research interests also include investigating something akin to logical-lego-building blocks, both for ontology design and semantic mappings.
Moreover, I strongly believe that the design of ontology systems should allocate serious consideration to user experiences. If we wish to attain critical mass, we need to move beyond systems and interfaces designed by engineers for engineers. While I believe every person unwittingly uses ontology all the time, not everyone can accurately express those ontologies. I hope to see (enable) the day where people can construct and vet examples in representations that are meaningful to them, while under-the-hood mapping these user-friendly surface representations to rigorous logical formalisms.
I've also spent a large part of the past two years evangelizing, explaining and championing ontology to various business and programming communities, and have seen significant progress in this respect. I am currently helping a company develop a mid-level legal ontology and pioneering its integration with NLP and Machine Learning systems. I would bring to the table the ability to understand industry perspectives and needs, while also maintaining a keen interest in research and theory.
As part of the IAOA EC, I also hope to be actively involved in the design of an online ontology textbook / resource that fully exploits the possibility of a web-based learning experience. This means pioneering novel ways of engaging students of all stripes, akin to Nature's recent biology textbook (http://www.nature.com/nature_education/interactive_textbooks).
Lastly, ontologists need to do a better job of articulating to the other disciplines and the general public, what ontologies are and why people should care. I believe we are at a precipice, and would work towards integrating "ontology" into the popular zeitgeist. I would contribute to the IAOA's mission which includes educating interested stakeholders and promoting ontology among diverse communities. As someone who is considering rejoining academia in pursuit of a PhD, I believe I would bring a unique and valuable perspective to the EC, while giving voice to important constituents within the IAOA.
I have been involved in ontology research and teaching for more than 10 years. I co-designed the logic SROIQ underlying the web ontology language OWL 2, the E-connections technique used in modular ontology design, as well as the distributed ontology language DOL that is currently under standardisation in ISO TC 37 (a meta-language subsuming most ontology languages in use today). My technical work within ontology research is focused on problems of modularity and structuring, and I have co-chaired several editions of the International Workshops on Modular Ontologies (WoMO) as well as co-edited a special issue of Applied Ontology on the subject. I am specifically interested in interdisciplinary applications of formal ontology, including in biomedicine and chemistry, design and architecture, and computational creativity. To this end, I co-chaired the 'SHAPES 1.0 - The Shape of Things' workshop, and will be philosophy program chair for the CONTEXT-8 conference 2013 in Trondheim, Norway. I support a pluralistic position in formal ontology, which means that I believe that different applications and reasoning scenarios require different ontological foundations, formal languages and tools. I hope that the development of DOL, in this respect, will bring significant advances in terms of interoperability.
Concerning my involvement within IAOA, I have been one of the founding members of IAOA in 2009, and have been co-chairing the infrastructure committee for a couple of years now, mainly responsible for website design and maintenance. I have promoted IAOA and its aims in various communities engaged in ontology research in a broad sense, and actively attracted involvement of several academic events as IAOA supported events.
Apart from continuing my previous efforts, one of my main concerns as an elected IAOA EC member would be to foster and strengthen the outreach to different communities that are involved in ontology research and its applications, specifically those transcending traditional disciplinary boundaries.
For more background about my research and activities, please visit my homepage at:
http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~okutz/
Since 2000 I have been fascinated by applied ontology and ontological

analysis, with its many facets and interdisciplinary cross connections. I have been fortunate to being able to study and work in the field since then. Accordingly, I strongly appreciated the initiation and formation of the IAOA in 2008 and 2009. My own current involvement primarily regards publicity for the FOIS 2012 conference. As an active observer, I find that overall good progress has been made in the association, thanks to the earlier and present EC members as well as through the voluntary engagement of several others. In the same spirit I commit to working for the IAOA and contributing to its aims.

Thematically, I would like to suggest and promote continued and focused

efforts regarding (no ranking of importance intended):

(1) further advancement of community interchange,
(2) visibility of ontology success stories,
(3) research methodologies and evaluation in applied ontology, and
(4) stabilization of educational efforts.
For (1), I believe that connections to several closely related areas and

communities should be fostered for mutual benefit (including knowledge representation or, more generally, artificial intelligence, the Semantic Web, formal concept analysis, and potentially others). It seems to me that exchange through the respective major conferences is currently limited. To some extent this connects to item (2) and expectations on the utility of formal ontologies in other communities, despite progress over several years that is visible within, for example, the IAOA and the bio-ontology communities.

For applied ontology as a field, I support the view that its research

methodologies should be further shaped (3). This concerns the conduction and assessment of research (in general) as well as the engineering and evaluation of ontologies (in particular). At the community level, both certainly requires the mediation of different perspectives due to the interdisciplinary character, the diversity of applied representation formalisms, and various levels between theory and practice within the field. I think that the IAOA should promote and help to coordinate tackling those issues. The same applies to the continuation of established or commenced educational projects (4) such as the summer school/institute and the provision of educational resources.

While not explicitly stated in its statutes, in my opinion a major long term goal of the IAOA should be to foster applied ontology from an emerging field to a mature scientific discipline -- a discipline that includes foundational research as well as the engineering of ontologies (as software artifacts).

This goal is already partially met by the IAOA, since it is a place where members can meet people with similar interests, exchange ideas, and start collaborations. I believe one task for the new EC will be to build on this strength by encouraging members to form additional technical committees, special interest groups, and regional chapters.

However, it takes more than a vibrant community for a field of interest to become scientific discipline. After all, alchemy had no shortage of practitioners. I would not call the current state of ontology development a "black art", but it is certainly not a mature engineering activity yet. As EC member I would encourage the IAOA to address three critical areas to improve the state of applied ontology:
(i) Engineering requires standards. Currently, much of the ontology community is relying on W3C semantic web standards. In the future we should (under the leadership of the IAOA Standards Coordination Committee) engage standards organizations actively and use our expertise to influence standards development. This includes standards for ontology languages (e.g., OWL, Common Logic) and standards about ontological content (e.g., Object Management Group's Date-Time Foundational Vocabulary).
(ii) Evaluation. The evaluation of ontologies is an open research question, and it is unlikely that it will be completely settled anytime soon. Nevertheless, it is important to the success of applied ontology that we are able to formulate best practices and evaluation criteria for ontology development.
(iii) Education. The Ontology Summit 2010 has shown that there is a strong demand within the community for more and better education opportunities. I am currently a co-chair of the IAOA Education Committee, which has organized the Summer Institute in Applied Ontology in 2011 and the upcoming Summer School in Ontological Analysis. The education committee is also working on plans for a textbook on applied ontology. This is a good beginning, but more needs to be done.
About me: After I received my PhD in philosophy in 2002, I worked as post-doc at the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS) and the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO). Since 2007 I am a guest researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). I have worked on a broad range of ontology-related subjects; including the semantics of Common Logic, Basic Formal Ontology, anatomy ontology, and semantic mediation. I serve as technical expert for the ISO TC37 SC3 WG3 "Ontology Integration and Interoperability" standard, and as co-chair of the IAOA Education Committee. Further, I have been a co-organizer of the Ontology Summit since 2009.
This is an exiting time for applied ontologists. Our field is still within the transition from a potpourri to a mature scientific discipline. I believe that the IAOA can play a critical role in this process. If you elect me, I'll work vigorously with the other EC members to ensure that the IAOA uses its unique opportunity.
As an elected member of the Executive Council of IAOA for the past 2 years (and an original member of the EC since 2009), I have been the EC liaison to the Education Committee, helping to establish the Summer Institute in Applied Ontology in 2011 and the Summer School in Ontological Analysis (coming soon) in 2012. I am also assisting currently on the Election Committee.
I have worked to support the development of ontological engineering and science since its origins in the early-mid 1990s, from my days at Boeing (1993-1997) and now at MITRE (1997-1999, 2001-present). In 1999, I left MITRE to create one of the first commercial ontology departments at VerticalNet.com, a business-to-business electronic commerce firm. Since my arrival at MITRE, I have introduced and proselytized the adoption of ontologies and semantic technologies throughout the US federal government. Along with Peter Yim and Kurt Conrad in 2002, I co-convened the Ontolog Forum, an open community of practice focused on ontological engineering. In addition, I've sought to expand the impact of ontologies by co-organizing the Ontology Summits, from 2006-present, including as general co-chair this year, where we brought together the ontology and the systems engineering communities in a collaboration focused on big systems.
My technical contributions through the years include participating in the original W3C Web Ontology Working Group that developed OWL, in US federal government metadata standards, on the Ontolog Open Ontology Repository initiative, and recently, to support the National Science Foundation's geo-sciences Earth Cube collaboration and various OMG and ISO activities related to ontology technology. My own research and development efforts have focused on combining the use of ontologies with automated reasoners based on logic programming and knowledge compilation techniques, and work that bridges the formal semantics of natural language to formal ontology.
I pledge to continue this work supporting open, standards-based ontological engineering and semantic technologies across many fronts, and invite our IAOA membership to more actively engage in changing the world of information technology through the adoption of these technologies.
Some of you may know me already as somebody involved in foundational

ontology research since its very beginning, though I have contributed to the field of biomedical ontologies, too. I'm both a philosopher and a computing scientist with papers in applied and formal ontology as well as in philosophical logic. As a founding member of the IAOA, I am eager to put my familiarity with a number of research efforts and communities to the service of this association.

As a member of the EC of the IAOA, I will of course promote the aims

of the association within the limits of its budget. In addition to this, I will promote and support any activities related to

(a) bridging the gap between different research programs in the community;
(b) advancing innovational research in foundational ontologies and their methodologies;
(c) involving researchers from outside computing science, especially philosophers.
With respect to (a), I am particularly concerned about a tendency of

our community to split up in different groups developing and applying different paradigms (DOLCE vs. BFO vs. GFO vs. SUMO vs. you name it). This unfortunate drifting apart undermines the prime objective of foundational ontology research, namely to foster semantic integration.

Therefore I believe that (b) we have to get back to basics and support

any effort to provide a common conceptual and methodological basis for ontology research. This minimal research consensus can have the form of generally agreed upon guidelines and a chart of ontological choices, including a list of open questions. This is also very important for outsiders and users which can only be convinced of the value of what we are doing, if we come up with a gold standard for research into ontologies and their applications.

Finally (c), since ontology is (also) a philosophical discipline, I

strongly believe that we can only make progress in foundational research if we get philosophers and logicians really involved in what we are doing, and we can only achieve this if we are willing to listen to them and learn from them.

In general, I believe the IAOA should support any effort to think

outside the box, as crazy as it may seem at first. More often than not, as engineers we have become prisoners of our own (successful) tools.

If you agree with this, then you should vote for me !
I've been member of the IAOA Executive Council, and served as treasurer

since the association creation. This has been an intense period of work for establishing the framework in which the association can function smoothly, develop its activities and grow. Beyond the topics related to membership and finances, within the infrastructure committee I've contributed in particular to setting up the database, the various registering tools, and the website. I'm glad to see that in this period the association has grown significantly: new major events are running and the membership from all over the world has almost doubled since last year (280 members from 47 different countries covering the 5 continents). Many students have joined IAOA (39% of students), a very healthy sign!

At the end of 2012, it will be almost 4 years that I'm serving the

association and it is time to bring new energies to the EC team. However, continuity must be guaranteed to avoid loosing some of the results obtained. So I'm accepting to candidate to these elections, offering to serve IAOA for another year (my wish is to be among those elected for one year only) and in particular help in appointing and assisting a new treasurer. Italian laws are not that easy to digest, and overall being treasurer is a demanding job. Continuity also requires to make sure that the new main events of IAOA, the summer institute and the summer school, keep going on in next years, that the Special Interest Groups already established increase their activity, and that the community of members get more connected and involved. Regarding this last point, I wish to pursue my efforts together with Oliver Kutz towards an effective usability of the website by members, to enable members to post news and give daily significance to our common space on the net.

At the crossroads between formal ontology and formal semantics in

knowledge representation and linguistics, my work has always been interdisciplinary. In the last years, I've also worked towards bridging the gap between theory and applications, on the role that formal ontology should play in practical ontologies, computational lexicons and NLP. I will contribute my experience to go on making IAOA a unique venue where interdisciplinarity is valued and really practiced, and where applied ontology is carried out with awareness and understanding of its theoretical foundations.

Election Results

Election and other Voting results were circulated - IAOA members should refer to the announcement of the results posted to the [iaoa-member] mailing list on 22-July-2012.

The newly elected Executive Council, and the Association's Offices (as elected by the Executive Council):

Note that the Association's new Offices (to be elected by the Executive Council) have not yet (22-July-2012) been established; the new Offices will be established prior to the beginning of the new Executive Council's term on 01-January-2013.

The new IAOA bylaws have been also approved.

At the face-to-face segment of the IAOA 2012 General Assembly on 25-July-2012 (co-located with FOIS-2012 in Graz, Austria) an Update Report on IAOA was presented by Nicola Guarino (President) and other members of the newly elected Executive Council.

This page is maintained by the Election Committee <iaoa-election@ontolog.cim3.net> -

John Bateman <bateman-at-uni-bremen.de>, Valter Cavecchia <valter-at-science.unitn.it>, Anthony Cohn <A.G.Cohn-at-leeds.ac.uk>,

Antony Galton <A.P.Galton@exeter.ac.uk>, Nicola Guarino <guarino-at-loa.istc.cnr.it> and Leo Obrst <lobrst-at-mitre.org>;

along with Secretary of the Executive Council Peter Yim <peter.yim-at-cim3.com>.

Please do not edit or modify this page yourself; send any editing request to the individuals named above.




Retrieved from "https://ontologforum.com/index.php?title=IAOA_ExecutiveCouncil_Election_2012&oldid=1553"