I am a member of the Program Committee of the "Formal Ontologies Meet Industry" (FOMI) Workshop, that will be held on June 9-10, 2005, near the Lake of Garda (Verona, Italy).

Modeling corporate knowledge is one of the most attractive themes in applied research and it has been an important motivation for several areas of investigations like distribute systems and knowledge management. Clearly, the business world considers this issue of strategic relevance and keeps paying particular attention to it because many theoretical results have already been proved effectiveness in real applications like data warehouse construction, information infrastructure definition, and all processes and applications of knowledge management.
These knowledge models in industry aim at providing a framework for information and knowledge sharing, reliable information exchange, meaning negotiation and coordination between distinct organizations or among members of the same one.
With the application of new methodologies and techniques in the everyday practice and the accessibility of new theoretical results in this area, developing new tools based on more sophisticated frameworks has become a common need. This is an important reason for the increasing interest in the employment of formal ontologies in fields like medicine, engineering, financial and legal systems, and other business practices.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• ontology methodologies in business practice;
• ontologies and corporate knowledge;
• formalization of the know-how;
• representation of artifacts and design;
• representation of functionalities;
• representation of knowledge and business processes;
• enterprise modeling;
• ontology evaluation;
• representation of business services;
• ontologies and electronic catalogs;
• ontologies and e-commerce;
• ontologies and marketing;
• ontologies in the practice of engineering;
• ontologies in the practice of medical sciences;
• ontologies in finance.

Here is the Home Page of the Workshop.