Joao Almeida-Domingues

Formal ontology is the systematic study of the types of entities and relations which make up the domains of interest represented in modern information systems. This publication presents the proceedings of FOIS 2026, the 16th edition of the Formal Ontology in Information Systems conference, held as a sequential hybrid event, combining the best of an in-person conference, held from 21 to 25 September 2026 in Vitoria, Brazil, with a virtual conference held on 9 September 2026. The FOIS conferences encourage the submission of high quality, not previously published results on both theoretical issues and practical advancements, and aim to be a nexus of interdisciplinary research and communication for researchers from the many domains engaging with formal ontology in information systems. The 2026 conference received a total of 57 full paper submissions, of which 16 were ultimately accepted for presentation and publication following a rigorous double-blind review process; an acceptance rate of 28%. These include 8 foundational papers (from 23 submissions), 1 methodological paper (from 6 submissions), 1 application paper (from 6 submissions), and 6 domain-specific ontology papers (from 22 submissions). The volume begins with a preface and 3 keynote speeches, followed by the 16 accepted papers, grouped under 3 broad categories: foundational issues; methodological issues and applications; and domain-specific ontologies. Providing an extensive overview of the latest research and developments in the field, this volume of proceedings will be of interest to all those whose work involves the application of formal ontology in information systems.

Formal ontology is the systematic study of the types of entities and relations which make up the domains of interest represented in modern information systems. This publication presents the proceedings of FOIS 2026, the 16th edition of the Formal Ontology in Information Systems conference, held as a sequential hybrid event, combining the best of an in-person conference, held from 21 to 25 September 2026 in Vitoria, Brazil, with a virtual conference held on 9 September 2026. The FOIS conferences encourage the submission of high quality, not previously published results on both theoretical issues and practical advancements, and aim to be a nexus of interdisciplinary research and communication for researchers from the many domains engaging with formal ontology in information systems. The 2026 conference received a total of 57 full paper submissions, of which 16 were ultimately accepted for presentation and publication following a rigorous double-blind review process; an acceptance rate of 28%. These include 8 foundational papers (from 23 submissions), 1 methodological paper (from 6 submissions), 1 application paper (from 6 submissions), and 6 domain-specific ontology papers (from 22 submissions). The volume begins with a preface and 3 keynote speeches, followed by the 16 accepted papers, grouped under 3 broad categories: foundational issues; methodological issues and applications; and domain-specific ontologies. Providing an extensive overview of the latest research and developments in the field, this volume of proceedings will be of interest to all those whose work involves the application of formal ontology in information systems.

Enterprise Risk Management involves the process of identification, evaluation, treatment, and communication regarding risks throughout the enterprise. To support the tasks associated with this process, several frameworks and modeling languages have been proposed, such as the Risk and Security Overlay (RSO) of ArchiMate. An ontological investigation of this artifact would reveal its adequacy, capabilities, and limitations w.r.t. the domain of risk and security. Based on that, a language redesign can be proposed as a refinement. Such analysis and redesign have been executed for the risk elements of the RSO grounded in the Common Ontology of Value and Risk. The next step along this line of research is to address the following research problems: What would be the outcome of an ontological analysis of security-related elements of the RSO? That is, can we identify other semantic deficiencies in the RSO through an ontological analysis? Once such an analysis is provided, can we redesign the security elements of the RSO accordingly, in order to produce an improved artifact? Here, with the aid of the Reference Ontology for Security Engineering (ROSE) and the ontological theory of prevention behind it, we address the remaining gap by proceeding with an ontological analysis of the security-related constructs of the RSO. The outcome of this assessment is an ontology-based redesign of the ArchiMate language regarding security modeling. In a nutshell, we report the following contributions: (1) an ontological analysis of the RSO that identifies six limitations concerning security modeling; (2) because of the key role of the notion of prevention in security modeling, the introduction of the ontological theory of prevention in ArchiMate; (3) a well-founded redesign of security elements of ArchiMate; and (4) ontology-based security modeling patterns that are logical consequences of our proposal of redesign due to its underlying ontology of security. As a form of evaluation, we show that our proposal can describe risk treatment options, according to ISO 31000. Finally, besides presenting multiple examples, we proceed with a real-world illustrative application taken from the cybersecurity domain.

The Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) was developed over the last two decades by consistently putting together theories from areas such as formal ontology in philosophy, cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophical logics. It comprises a number of micro-theories addressing fundamental conceptual modeling notions, including entity types and relationship types. The aim of this paper is to summarize the current state of UFO, presenting a formalization of the ontology, along with the analysis of a number of cases to illustrate the application of UFO and facilitate its comparison with other foundational ontologies in this special issue. (The cases originate from the First FOUST Workshop – the Foundational Stance, an international forum dedicated to Foundational Ontology research.)