FOIS 2012 is collocated with ICBO 2012, the third International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies. Formal Ontology is now applied to such diverse domains as artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, bioinformatics, GIS, knowledge engineering, information retrieval, and the Semantic Web. FOIS is intended to gather researchers with an interest in formal ontology, where both theoretical issues and concrete applications can be explored in an interdisciplinary spirit.

FOIS is the flagship conference of the International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA).