Third International Workshop on Definitions in Ontologies (IWOOD 2015)
Held in conjunction with the 6th International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies (ICBO 2015)


Monday, July 27, 2015
9:00-12:30
Room 8.2.06

  • Ontology Visualization Tools to Assist in Creating and Maintaining Textual Term Definitions
    Daniel R. Schlegel and Peter L. Elkin
  • Defining ‘Function’
    Andrew D. Spear and Barry Smith
  • Automatic Verbalisation of Biological Events
    Bikash Gyawali, Claire Gardent, and Christophe Cerisara
This half-day event is the third workshop in the series on Definitions in Ontologies. The first two such workshops (DO 2013 and IWOOD 2014) were held in conjunction with ICBO 2013 and ICBO 2014. This third workshop will be held in conjunction with ICBO 2015 in Lisbon, Portugal, from July 27 to 30, 2015. 

Definitions of terms in ontologies serve a number of purposes. Logical definitions allow reasoners to assist in the process of classification and to verify the results, thereby lessening the development burden. Natural language definitions help ameliorate low inter-annotator agreement. Good definitions make it possible for non-experts and experts in adjacent disciplines to understand unfamiliar terms, thereby making it possible for them to reuse terms in external ontologies. In this way definitions can help to facilitate integration of data.

The goals of this workshop are: 
  • to raise awareness of the importance of well-constructed definitions; 
  • to bring together interested researchers and developers to explore issues relating to definitions and enable cross-fertilization leading to new approaches; 
  • to share case studies that expose difficulties arising in definition construction, evaluation, interpretation, and revision; 
  • to encourage evaluation of definitions by readers from different domains in order to surface potential difficulties in interpretation; 
  • to encourage participants to bring practices back to their projects that benefit the quality of their ontologies.