The Fourth Interdisciplinary School on Applied Ontology has just come to an end, after five days of lectures, mini-projects, a poster session, exercises, and social activities spread over six days from 10 to 15 September in Cape Town on the UCT campus. It’s not exactly fair to call this a ‘trip report’, as I was the local organizer and one of the lecturers, but it’s a brief recap ‘trip report kind of blog post’ nonetheless.
The scientific programme consisted of lectures and tutorials on:
- Mereology, location, and time by Prof. Maureen Donnelly (with the Department of Philosophy from the State University of New York at Buffalo, USA);
- Biomedical Ontology by Prof. Stefan Schulz (with the Medical University in Graz, Austria);
- Foundations of Description Logics by Prof. Arina Britz (with the Department of Information Science, Stellenbosch University);
- Semantics and conceptual modeling by myself;
- Ontology for robotics by Dr. Stefano Borgo (with the Laboratory for Applied Ontology, CNR, in Trento, Italy);
- Applied mereolgy by Prof. Peter Simons (emeritus, with Trinity College Dublin, Ireland).
The linked slides (titles of the lectures, above) reveal only part of the contents covered, though. There were useful group exercises and plenary discussion with the ontological analysis of medical terms such as what a headache is, a tooth extraction, blood, or aspirin, an exercises on putting into practice the design process of a conceptual modelling language of one’s liking (e.g.: how to formalize flowcharts, including an ontological analysis of what those elements are and ontological commitments embedded in a language), and trying to prove some theorems of parthood theories.
There was also a session with 2-minute ‘blitztalks’ by participants interested in briefly describing their ongoing research, which was followed by an interactive poster session.
It was the first time that an ISAO had mini-projects, which turned out to have had better outcomes than I expected, considering the limited time available for it. Each group had to pick a term and investigate what it meant in the various disciplines (task description); e.g.: what does ‘concept’ or ‘category’ mean in psychology, ontology, data science, and linguistics, and ‘function’ in manufacturing, society, medicine, and anatomy? The presentations at the end of the week by each group were interesting and most of the material presented there easily could be added to the IAOA Education wiki’s term list (an activity in progress).
What was not a first-time activity, was the Ontology Pub Quiz, which is a bit of a merger of scientific programme and social activity. We created a new version based on questions from several ISAO’18 lecturers and a few relevant questions created earlier (questions and answers; we did only questions 1-3,6-7). We tried a new format compared to the ISAO’16 quiz and JOWO’17 quiz: each team had 5 minutes to answer a set of 5 questions, and another team marked the answers. This set-up was not as hectic as the other format, and resulted in more within-team interaction cf. among all participants interaction. As in prior editions, some questions and answers were debatable (and there’s still the plan to make note of that and fix it—or you could write an article about it, perhaps :)). The students of the winning team received 2 years free IAOA membership (and chocolate for all team members) and the students of the other two teams received one year free IAOA membership.
Impression of part of the poster session area, moving into the welcome reception
As with the three previous ISAO editions, there was also a social programme, which aimed to facilitate getting to know one another, networking, and have time for scientific conversations. On the first day, the poster session eased into a welcome reception (after a brief wine lapse in the coffee break before the blitztalks). The second day had an activity to stretch the legs after the lectures and before the mini-project work, which was a Bachata dance lesson by Angus Prince from Evolution Dance. Not everyone was eager at the start, but it turned out an enjoyable and entertaining hour. Wednesday was supposed to be a hike up the iconic Table Mountain, but of all the dry days we’ve had here in Cape Town, on that day it was cloudy and rainy, so an alternative plan of indoor chocolate tasting in the Biscuit Mill was devised and executed. Thursday evening was an evening off (from scheduled activities, at least), and Friday early evening we had the pub quiz in the UCT club (the campus pub). Although there was no official planning for Saturday afternoon after the morning lectures, there was again an attempt at Table Mountain, concluding the week.
The participants came from all over the world, including relatively many from Southern Africa with participants coming also from Botswana and Mauritius, besides several universities in South Africa (UCT, SUN, CUT). I hope everyone has learned something from the programme that is or will be of use, enjoyed the social programme, and made some useful new contacts and/or solidified existing ones. I look forward to seeing you all at the next ISAO or, better, FOIS, in 2020 in Bolzano, Italy.
Finally, as a non-trip-report comment from my local chairing viewpoint: special thanks go to the volunteers Zubeida Khan for the ISAO website, Zola Mahlaza and Michael Harrison for on-site assistance, and Sam Chetty for the IT admin.
Keet blog 
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