Knowledge of each other is knowledge for the machines
at the Joint Ontology Workshops (JOWO) 2025,
co-located with the
15th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems FOIS 2025
08-12 September, 2025 (Catania, Italy)
Workshop chairs
Max Willis, Universitat Politècnica de València (ES)
Greta Adamo Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (IT)
Playing with Meanings returns this year to the Joint Ontology Workshops program for its second iteration, PwM2, a full-day workshop that continues the exploration of games, play and ontology- based group conceptual modelling. Participants to the workshop will be guided through a series of structured, rule-based, discursive interactions that are designed to incite stimulating discussion around the topic of ontologies and conceptual modelling as mediums for eliciting, mediating and visualising shared understandings. Playing with Meanings takes a distinctly human-centric approach, exploring participatory methods for inclusion and diversity, collectively voicing perspectives, experiences and worldview(s) while co-producing formal, human- and machine-readable knowledge.
Each session begins with a brief introduction to the game artifact origins and conceptual background, followed by one hour of gameplay exploring various themes of the game, and will finish up with a short debrief. Everyone is welcome welcome to join at any time; come and explore these unique interrogations of ontologies, conceptual models, games and play together!
The convivial 3rd place and collaborative social contract of game and play set the stage for PwM activities, fostering intersubjective engagement between participants, navigating expertise discourses, and allowing every participant to articulate their knowledge and opinions as equal contributions to group discussions. In combination with games, we practice various methods of ontology-based group modelling to concretise players’ emergent, shared understandings of concepts and their relations, leveraging visual and embodied communication in the creation of conceptual models, discursive artefacts in and of themselves, which aid in establishing, interrogating and co-producing knowledge. PwM strives for a relaxed atmosphere of competitive fun and open-ended play, and is open to all JOWO and FOIS attendees. The workshop is divided into fixed sessions, each introducing and playing a purpose-built ontology-based group modelling game to allow participants to experience the actual co-production of knowledge while practicing in-game group modelling techniques and discussing the potentials to apply these participatory practices to their own research and development projects.