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Ontolog Forum

IAOA Executive Council Election, 2010

[ 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 Secretary) of Assembly and Election Process: April 6, 2010
  • Nomination and Discussion opens: April 6, 2010
  • Campaigning by candidates: starts upon completion of the nomination-verification-acceptance of a candidate
  • Nomination closes: April 23, 2010
  • Campaigning and Discussion closes: April 26, 2010
  • IAOA Assembly called to order (by the IAOA President): April 27, 2010
  • Candidates list and other ballot items published: April 27, 2010
  • Ballot opens: April 28, 2010
  • Ballot closes: end-of-day May 3, 2010 (Monday, CEST)
  • Announcement of election results: May 5, 2010
  • The Assembly will culminate in a face-to-face meeting (remote attendance supported) during FOIS in Toronto, Canada, on May 13, 2010
  • New Executive Council takes office: May 13, 2010

Terms of Reference

Please refer to the IAOA Statute (especially Clause 18 regarding the Executive Council)

Process Details

Nomination: April 6 - April 23, 2010

  • Starting from April 6, 2010 you can nominate any individual (including yourself) as a candidate for membership in the next IAOA Executive Council (EC).
  • While any person may nominate or be nominated, only individuals who are verified, as an IAOA member in good standing prior to the actual election, may nominate or be a proper candidate to go on the ballot.
  • To make a nomination, either send an email to the [iaoa-member] mailing list <iaoa-member@ontolog.cim3.net> (if you are already an IAOA member) or write an email to our Election Coordinators (Stefano Borgo <borgo@loa-cnr.it> and Peter Yim <peter.yim@cim3.com>) 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.
  • The individual making a nomination should be responsible for communicating with the nominee, see to it that they both meet the membership requirement, and get the nominee to send his/her acceptance (on the nomination and candidacy) to the Election Coordinators in writing (via email to Stefano Borgo <borgo@loa-cnr.it> and Peter Yim <peter.yim@cim3.com>).
  • The nomination period closes at midnight April 23 (CEST).
  • Where necessary, IAOA EC will facilitate a fast track membership approval for individuals involved in the nomination process, in case they weren't already members of IAOA (max 3 days from the time membership fee is received into the IAOA bank account).

Campaigning and discussion: April 6 - April 26, 2010

  • Once a nominee has been verified to be a member in good standing, and has accepted the nomination, he/she should send to the Election Coordinators (via email to Stefano Borgo <borgo@loa-cnr.it> and Peter Yim <peter.yim@cim3.com>):
    • (b) 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 April 26, 2010 (CEST).

Official start of the First IAOA Assembly: April 27, 2010

  • 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 Coordinators on the same day (Apr. 27) for rectification.

Ballot: April 28 - May 3, 2010

  • IAOA members can vote online from April 28 till midnight May 3, 2010 (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 electronic vote at: http://www.iaoa.org/ios/2010-EC-election/2010-EC-election.html
    • one will need his membership password to get into the voting site
    • if you lost your password or have trouble with your authentication, write the Election Coordinators for help.

Voting outcome

  • Immediately after voting is closed at midnight May 3, 2010 (CEST), raw results of the votes will be available at: http://www.iaoa.org/ios/x-results.php
    • 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 the case of a tie, the candidate that became IAOA member first (based on the date the person signed up as an IAOA member) will be elected. If there is still a tie, the youngest is elected.
  • The members that are elected will form the new IAOA Executive Committee and will take office during the IAOA Assembly face-to-face meeting on May 13 (Toronto, Canada).
  • Ballots that need to be passed with a simple majority will carry if a simple majority is attained.
  • On other items where a multiple choice is available (such as the choice of logo), the option that receives more votes is chosen.
  • 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 May 5, 2010.
  • 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 Coordinators (via email to Stefano Borgo <borgo@loa-cnr.it> and Peter P. Yim <peter.yim@cim3.com>) 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: 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 Coordinators (via email to Stefano Borgo <borgo@loa-cnr.it> and Peter P. Yim <peter.yim@cim3.com>), 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.
  • 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. A special arrangement has been instituted to expedite new membership applications. Anyhow, if you make your membership application by 29 Apr 2010 (and pay with a credit card or paypal) you should still be able to catch the last day of the voting window, and get your vote in before the end-of-day (CEST) Monday, 3 May 2010. ... Please check out the message from the IAOA Treasure regarding last minute details.
  • 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 17) 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 did at least one of the following acts:
      • (i) sent in a confirmation (nominally to the [iaoa-member] mailing list) after the IAOA Secretary announced the Assembly schedule and process (ref. post from Stefano Borgo dated 6 Apr 2010 under the subject: "IAOA EC election: information and procedure"),
      • (ii) sent in a confirmation after the IAOA President call the Assembly to order (via email, which Nicola Guarino is expected to do on 27 April 2010),
      • (iii) cast you electronic vote between 28 April and 3 May 2010 (ref. post from Stefano Borgo dated 25 Apr 2010 under the subject: "IAOA 2010 Voting process and rationale")
  • Question: What is the term of office for the newly elected IAOA Executive Council (EC)?
    • Answer: it will be either 3 years (as stated in the Statute now) or 2 years (if the proposal to change the term to 2 years (in order to match the physical assemblies held at FOIS conferences) gets adopted by the IAOA Assembly in this election.
  • Question: How can we find out who is a member of IAOA and who is not?
    • Answer: All members are subscribed to the [iaoa-member] mailing list, when they are confirmed by the Executive Council (after they send in their membership application and paid their dues.) Any subscriber to the [iaoa-member] list (i.e. a confirmed member) can access the full list of subscribers (with one's mailing list password assigned by the system when first subscribed) at: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/iaoa-member ... please check under the "iaoa-member Subscribers" section near the bottom of the page and click on "visit subscriber list" button.

List of Nominations

( Nominations were closed as of end 23-Apr-2010 )

  • 2010.04.08 - Professor Carlo Penco (Dept. of Philosophy, University of Genova, Italy) nominated Barry Smith (University at Buffalo)
    • the nomination was first accepted, but later withdrawn by Barry Smith in support of the candidacy of his soon to be University at Buffalo colleague, Alan Ruttenberg
  • 2010.04.09 - Professor Mara Abel (Institute of Informatics, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) nominated Giancarlo Guizzardi (Department of Informatics, Federal University of Espírito Santo, Brazil)
    • this nomination was also supported by Prof. Maria Luiza Machado Campos (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ))
  • 2010.04.10 - Professor Dr.med. Stefan Schulz (IMBI, University Medical Center Freiburg, Germany) nominated Alan Ruttenberg (Science Commons, USA)
    • candidate/affiliation updated to read Alan Ruttenberg (Buffalo, Science Commons, USA)
  • 2010.04.22 - Dr. Antony Galton (University of Exeter, UK) nominated Pierre Grenon (KMi, Open University, UK)
    • this nomination was also supported by Dr. Laure Vieu (IRIT-CNRS, France)
  • 2010.04.22 - Professor Dr. Heinrich Herre (IMISE, University of Leipzig, Germany) nominated Robert Hoehndorf (European Bioinformatics Institute, UK)

List of Candidates

( as of end 23-Apr-2010, the closing of nomination )

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

Candidates and their Position Statements

[ John Bateman ]

[ Stefano Borgo ]

[ Pierre Grenon ]

[ Michael Gruninger ]

[ Nicola Guarino ]

[ Giancarlo Guizzardi ]

[ Robert Hoehndorf ]

[ Riichiro Mizoguchi ]

[ Leo Obrst ]

[ Alan Ruttenberg ]

[ Laure Vieu ]

[ Peter Yim ]

I've been involved in ontologies on and off since 1989, when we started documenting the Penman Upper Model used in the Penman text generation system at ISI in Los Angeles and discussing its potential application as a general domain ontology. Since then I've worked on ontologies in many application areas, focusing increasingly on how to construct modular ontologies that allow accommodation of different, and not necessarily mutually compatible, perspectives on the worlds being modelled. Currently I am involved in ontology construction in several research and development projects spanning natural language processing, spatial cognition, domotics, travel services, geographic information, health services, and assisted living.
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. This may well involve combining the work and requirements of diverse communities, and so putting diverse ontologies together will be an important capability. Bringing different areas together and respecting their ontological requirements is then central. I see IAOA as providing an organisational structure within which such interaction can be supported and developed further.
I also see a role in IAOA as a way of synchronising and strengthening applications for funding. Although there are several efforts currently moving in the direction of trying to build more formal ontologies spanning varieties of domains, many of these remain on a voluntary basis: this situation need to be improved by getting more money flowing into advanced ontology development. For this, we'll need targetted use cases, educational measures, and reliable ontology publicity that unites different groups and approaches. In all these respects, I believe IAOA should adopt a leading and guiding position, bringing together the diversity of participants required to make it work.
I have been working for the establishment of IAOA because I believe we need to help the ontology community to grow and be recognized as a reference point in research and application. Of course, there are other groups in this research area. IAOA differs because it aims to gather people and to foster activities that focus on ontology content.
It takes time to build an association and the first period one has to work on things like organization and procedures, and to publicize the existence of the association itself. I've been working on these aspects in the first year of the IAOA by taking the role of the association secretary.
From this experience, I believe we need another year to get the association in good shape from the organizational and the formal viewpoint. Overall, I can say we had a good start and I'm ready to help finishing this job.
In terms of outreach activities, I like to be pragmatic. IAOA relies on voluntary work and, being a young organization, it has to manage the budged with care. In the two coming years I believe the EC should focus on two main issues:
- Establishing connections with institutions that pursue similar aims
- Organizing/stimulating conferences, meetings open to the different stakeholders, and educational activities (this can be done directly as IAOA and indirectly by supporting IAOA members)
Within IAOA, I believe the EC should aim to:
- promoting active interactions between EC and IAOA members
- fostering collaboration among IAOA members
I've been working as an ontologist for 10 years, in R&D and the

academy, doing foundational and domain ontology, from the standpoints of philosophy and knowledge representation for knowledge bases and Web applications.

It is with a disposition that follows from the considerations below

that I am proposing to serve the association, presently as part of its executive council.

At this stage, I see the role of the EC as:
- to maintain the core functioning of the association
- to allow the association to grow based on the involvement of its members
- to guide this evolution towards establishing the IAOA as a relevant

learned society for ontology and its application and a professional association of ontologists of all makes.

Credo
While the association needs to have a strong identity centred on

ontology, it must reflect the fact that ontology is a collaborative cross-disciplinary field that moreover reaches out to varied connected areas of activities.

The value of the association is in, or will emerge from, the

association being a flexible platform for fostering, supporting, and federating thematic interest groups, local chapters, and sporadic initiatives.

The association is particularly relevant and needed in promoting:
- common understanding in our field
- the establishment of communal knowledge and resources
- the exposure of students to all facets of the relevant activities
- and supporting relevant initiatives, such as emerging from the

recent Ontology Summit on education or other communal and community-building efforts.

The International Association of Ontology and its Applications is 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 16 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. As the 2009 Ontology Summit showed, many fruitful interactions can be expected between applied ontology and the standards communities, including such international bodies such as ISO, W3C, and OMG.
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.
I have been involved with all of the Ontology Summits, where I have seen the tremendous benefit of building bridges between communities. The topic of most recent Ontology Summit (Creating the Ontologists of the Future) illustrates the critical role that the IAOA can play in facilitating the development of common ontology curricula for both academic and industrial education.
The inauguration of the IAOA is an exciting and challenging time. We have 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 discovered the role of interdisciplinarity in computer science around 1988, while, as a biomedical engineer, I was striving with representing medical knowledge. Stimulated by John Sowa's first book, I had the chance to start frequenting the local circle of analytic philosophy at Padua University, and slowly a whole new world opened to me. The key to formal ontology where the seminal works by Peter Simons and Barry Smith. In the States, people had just started talking of ontologies for knowledge sharing and reuse, and I realized that formal ontology was the right way to approach those problems, helping people (not just computers) to make explicit their conceptualizations. In the same period I also discovered the importance of linguistic analysis in KR, thanks to the work of Reind van der Riet, Jerry Hobbs, and James Pustejovsky. In 1993 I organised in Padua (with Roberto Poli) the first International Workshop on Formal Ontology in Conceptual Analysis and Knowledge Representation, which had a strong impact on a large interdisciplinary community.
After some passionate years spent discussing the role of ontologies mainly with the knowledge acquisition and KR communities, in 1998 we had the first FOIS conference, which paved the establishment of a new community and an interdisciplinary area of research: Applied Ontology. The sabbatical spent by Chris Welty in my lab in Padova alllowed us to "popularize" the first technical results of our formal approach through the OntoClean methodology, and the move to Trento in 2003, to found the new Lab for Applied Ontology, allowed me to set up the small, beautiful group of people which produced the DOLCE foundational ontology, one of our best known results.
Thanks to a brilliant intuition from IOS Press, the community got its own journal in 2004. Since then, the idea of establishing an international association has been in the air for a while. When we finally decided to go for it, my major preoccupation was to make sure to guarantee a truly democratic and open process, giving everybody a chance to participate and to construct our association "from the bottom". Well, the bootstrap process hasn't been that simple, but we now have it!
For the future, I must say I am still willing to continue spending my energy in this initiative for one year or two, but then it will be time to step back and let others bring their contributions.
In conclusion (using the words we used for the ESF proposal), I believe IAOA distinguishes itself from other initiatives (mainly focusing on technological aspects) for its explicit interdisciplinary character and its openness towards researchers, students and professionals worldwide. My wish is to establish an active scientific community bridging together three broad categories of people:
1. Philosophers who have an interest in applying their analytical tools to technology advancement;
2. cognitive scientists, linguists and terminologists aware of the subtle interplays among ontology, language, and cognition;
3. computer scientists and IT professionals aware of the desperate need of a humble interdisciplinary approach for building future generation socio-technical systems.
I am convinced that the cross-fertilization of the above communities is absolutely necessary, and could well lead to the emergence of an entirely new discipline.
As a member of the Executive Council, I would like to work to advance our discipline along the following four lines of action:
First, I would like to contribute to promote the systematization and dissemination of a Body of Knowledge for Applied Ontology and Ontology Engineering, in the lines of what has been achieved in disciplines such as, for instance, Software Engineering (http://www.computer.org/portal/web/swebok).
Second, I would like to contribute to promote a methodical analysis of our current Body of Knowledge to identify important knowledge gaps. With the results of this analysis, we could systematically support scientific venues aimed at addressing these gaps.
Third, I would like to contribute to the true internationalization of the association and to the expansion of its presence and relevance to national communities. 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 particularized environments.

Finally, in order to promote interdisciplinary research, the association should be truly interdisciplinary. Thus, I would like to contribute to the dissemination of ontological research and education to areas in which ontology can have a great impact. In particular, I would like to continue to promote formal ontology in the areas of Conceptual Modeling, Databases, Information Systems and Software Engineering.
I have joined the IAOA to contribute to the further development of

applied ontology as a scientific discipline. Applied ontology is a young area of research, and its methods are still under development. Any area of research requires methods for evaluating its progress. Although some methods, such as OntoClean, have been developed to evaluate ontologies and their internal structure, I believe we still lack commonly accepted criteria to evaluate the success of ontological engineering efforts. We as a community are in the position to make progress towards establishing these criteria, which would, ideally, lead to a means for empirically evaluating ontologies. This is an important step towards further establishing applied ontology as a scientific discipline. I would like to promote discussion of these efforts within the IAOA.

Another important aspect will be the creation of an educational

resource for applied ontology, which can guide students and researchers through various problems in formal and applied ontology. I believe that this resource should be developed in an open form by the community, similar to the Ontogenesis effort (http://ontogenesis.knowledgeblog.org/). Ontogenesis aims to create an open educational resource for biomedical ontology and knowledge representation in the form of a collection of Blog articles which are all peer-reviewed. Creating a resource for applied ontology will require the collaboration of logicians, philosophers, computer scientists, linguists and domain experts. Therefore, the IAOA is in a priviledged position to create such a resource. I would like to encourage participation in open projects such as Ontogenesis or the Ontolog Forum.

Being a young researcher myself, I would like to promote activities

towards the support of students in applied ontologies. One form could be the organization of a doctoral consortium at conferences such as FOIS, where students can get advise on their research by experienced scientists.

I have been working on ontological engineering for more than 15 years.

My first ontology paper is published in 1992 at JKAW (Japanese KA Workshop). Since then, I have been investigating task ontology which I coined, role theory, function ontology, upper ontology (YAMATO), ontology building tool (Hozo) and functional-model description tool as well as building fundamental ontologies such as clinical ontology, ontology of learning/instructional theories and so on with serious applications. For example, SOFAST, a functional-model description tool developed jointly by my colleagues, has been deployed in industries.

Unfortunately, I understand Asia is not active in ontology research. In

order to make IAOA a real international society on ontology and its application, I believe I can contribute to disseminating IAOA activities not only in Western world but in Asia. On the basis of my past and current research experiences, I'd like to support dissemination of ontology research activity into Asia by playing the role of a bridging person between these two worlds.

Fortunately, I have a reasonable amount of experience in collaborating

with industries and organizing conferences as well as doing academic research, I am willing to contribute to establishing ontology research and its application as a new discipline.

I have worked to support the development of ontological engineering and science since its origins in the early-mid 1990s. I've addressed the adoption of these technologies on three fronts:
1) governmentally, by introducing and proselytizing the adoption of semantic technologies in the US federal government since 1998;
2) commercially, by creating one of the first commercial ontology departments in 1999-2001;
3) collaboratively and openly, by helping to establish Ontolog Forum, since its inception in 2002, and now IAOA, to support better standards, practices, and the adoption and sharing of ontology technologies.
I pledge to continue this work across many fronts, and will additionally support outreach within IAOA to establish national chapters in developing and non-Western countries, and support the promotion of efforts to include more women in IAOA and ontology technologies. Although IAOA is a young organization, we need to act forcefully, set guidelines, promote good practices, publicly advocate sound ontology technologies and their incorporation into mainstream educational instruction and computational practice, and expand our efforts in influencing commercial and governmental information technology.
I'm a computational biologist and ontologist, using ontologies for science and working through consequences that follow from such use - technical, social, and legal. I work as Principal Scientist at Science Commons, with recent appointment as Director of Clinical Data Exchange at the University of Buffalo. Over the past years I have been involved with community efforts, co-chairing the OWL 2 Working Group and serving as coordinating editor of the OBO Foundry, and serving as a task force lead for the INCF Program for Ontologies of Neural Structures.
I will bring novel perspectives, based on this experience, to complement the IAOA executive board. Specifically:
Legal aspects of ontology reuse: Ontologies are copyrightable, and without explicit permissions, subject to rather draconian restrictions on reuse. What licensing strategies should be used to permit the sorts of reuse members want?
Social processes by which ontologies are built and adopted: I work in a number of collaborative ontology development efforts. Working with large groups of people is always challenging - what can we learn and share about making such collaborations successful?
Standardization efforts: We're moving from a situation in which ontology development and reuse was only via non-interoperable systems, to one in which it is more likely we can share our work using standard components. How can we further and influence this process?
Engagement with semantic web researchers on use of ontology: Ontology is an enabling component for the development of a Semantic Web. How can we engage the various communities in this effort?
In the past year, I was part of the Transitory Executive Council. It was good to participate in this collective process and see our joined creative energies turning into a new social entity. I am presenting myself because I believe the association requires prolongated efforts to become solid enough and thriving.
The challenge is that the community still needs to be shaped in order to be recognized by its own members and by the rest of the academic world. Our difficulty, but our strength too, is that we are stemming from many disciplines and have a large variety of views. Truly interdisciplinary research is particularly difficult to establish, so as to, e.g., appear as such in education and curricula or have its own Special Interest Groups structured around distinctive research topics (and not simply imported from the original disciplines nor from application areas). The vision is that IAOA be the place to help coordinate and develop the many initiatives of our community, some already existing and others requiring IAOA's support to happen. I'd like to continue helping this to be.
In this year, besides being active in the collective decisions of the EC, I have played the role of treasurer of IAOA. This means I learned a lot about the Italian fiscal and banking systems and on developing joining forms (but also that I was thrilled to see the first registrations come in and recently pass the 100 line). This administrative matter is the boring side of the expertise I'm offering you. On the other hand, I have the experience of 20 years of interdisciplinary research, one foot in logic-based knowledge representation, the other in formal semantics in linguistics. The common ground was my focus on ontology from the start, when it was not yet a topic line in computer science conferences.
I would like to start by declaring that I am dedicated to helping

establish "Ontology and its Applications" as a professional discipline, and to move the adoption of that into the mainstream. I truly believe in the strategic importance of "Ontology" work, and see it as a key enabler to the next level of "computing" and "human-machine" capabilities.

As an advocate for "open technology" and "open knowledge," I assert

that the fundamental research and development work in Ontology need to be kept "open" and to be accessible to all. Therefore, I support open collaboration as a means for our community to bootstrap our collective intelligence towards advancing this field. To help achieve that, I see the need for both an informal community of practice (a model we are using at ONTOLOG <http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki>) as well as a formally established professional society (as in IEEE, ACM, etc.), which I hope we can jointly build IAOA into.

It has been an honor and a privilege for me to work as part of the

Transitional IAOA Executive Council to help get the Association established. I shall continue to dedicate myself and devote my energies into advancing the abovementioned agenda, along with those adopted by IAOA's Executive Council and Membership-at-large if I do get elected into the next IAOA-EC.

Election Results

Election and other Voting results were circulated - IAOA members should refer to the announcements of the results posted to the [iaoa-member] mailing list on 5-May-2010

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

At the face-to-face segment of the IAOA First General Assembly on 13-May-2010 (co-located with FOIS-2010 in Toronto, Canada) an updated 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 Coordinators (Stefano Borgo <borgo@loa-cnr.it> and Peter Yim <peter.yim@cim3.com>)

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




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