Since its start ten years ago, the International Conference in Formal Ontology on Information Systems (FOIS) has explored the multiple perspectives on the notion of ontology that have arisen from such diverse research communities as philosophy, logic, computer science, cognitive science, linguistics, and various scientific domains. As ontologies have been applied in new and exciting domains such as the World Wide Web, bioinformatics and geographical information systems, it has become evident that there is a need for ontologies that have been developed with solid theoretical foundations based o.