Call for Submissions¶

ICBO 2026 invites contributions exploring the critical role of ontologies and semantic technologies in developing trustworthy, interpretable, and AI-ready ecosystems. Original research, system descriptions, and position papers are invited addressing the following challenges.

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Topics of Interest¶

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ICBO Conference Proceeding Publication Requirements¶

All conference submissions accepted will be published in the CEUR Workshop Proceedings as part of the new IAOA series. An example from a past conference can be seen here.

In order for this to happen, the following requirements must be satisfied:

• All submissions should be in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) and should follow the CEUR-Template-1col-ICBO2026.docx file, single column.
• The template in OverLeaf (LaTeX) version is tbd (To be updated soon).
• Ensure that the conference name, date, and place, and email addresses and ORCIDs of all authors are added to the footnote on the lower left of the first page.
• Note that the template (.docx version) provided in the link above already includes the standardized copyright footer for ICBO 2026 with the conference name and date. You only need to fill in the EMAIL and ORCID information for each author.
• All papers for ICBO MUST have an accompanying signed Author Agreement to Publish a Contribution as Open-Access on CEUR-WS.org prepared by the corresponding author. Please download one of the ICBO 2026 customized forms below:
  • AUTHOR-AGREEMENT (NTP): Authors shall use this form if they included no copyrighted third party material in their paper text (or accompanying sources, datasets). This is the right variant in most cases.
  • AUTHOR-AGREEMENT (TP): Authors shall use this form if they did include copyrighted third party material in their paper or accompanying material. They must then also attach a copy of the permission by the third party to use this material in the signed author agreement!
• Fill in the fields on the AUTHOR-AGREEMENT form, print it out, sign it in ink (by hand), then scan or photograph the form and both upload it on official administrative website (To be updated soon) and send it to: ontology.world@gmail.com with a subject heading that reads "Author Agreement for submission PAPER [PAPER-ID]".
• Do NOT digitally sign the pdf, as CEUR-WS.org will not accept it. CEUR-WS.org allows an alternative method to provide a signature if you are unable to print the form, as shown here.
• Update your camera-ready paper on the official administrative website (To be updated soon).

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Call for ICBO Conference Papers¶

Conference paper submission deadline: May 1, 2026. Notification: June 1, 2026.

The following paper categories are welcome:

For each paper accepted, at least one author must register.

Submission link: Coming soon.

Workshop & Tutorial Proposals¶

Workshop submission — one pager including title, organizers names and contacts, workshop description, duration.

Send to: Boonserm (Serm) Kulvatunyou — boonserm.kulvatunyou@nist.gov

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Call for Direct-to-Journal Track Papers¶

Direct-to-journal track submission deadline: April 15, 2026. Notification: June 1, 2026.

In collaboration with the Journal of Biomedical Semantics (JBMS).

Papers submitted to the International Conference on Biological and Biomedical Ontology track at the Journal of Biomedical Semantics will be published immediately after acceptance and presented in the annual conference following acceptance.

The new ICBO Thematic Series at the JBMS is soliciting submissions of novel (not previously published nor concurrently submitted) research papers in the areas of ontology design, development, evaluation and use, ontology interoperability, knowledge graphs, ontology-driven intelligent systems, ontologies for explainable AI, and the application of ontologies to biological and biomedical problems, across the full range of life sciences. In addition, we would like to invite contributions showcasing methods for ontology-based research, including statistical methods, tool support for ontologies and semantic technologies including for the annotation of data, visualisation, analysis, and related applications, and contributions addressing the challenges associated with working with multiple ontologies at the same time, including ontology alignment and matching. Submissions are welcome from a broad range of approaches to ontology building and use.

More information can be found at https://link.springer.com/collections/gagejcafef.

Submission: The submission guidelines will follow the journal's submission requirements — see Journal of Biomedical Semantics submission guidelines.

Contact: Sunghwan Kim

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Important Dates¶

Track	Submission Deadline	Acceptance Notification
Workshop & Tutorial Proposals	March 30, 2026	April 6, 2026
Direct-to-Journal Track	April 15, 2026	June 1, 2026
Main Conference Papers	May 1, 2026	June 1, 2026
Posters & Software Demos	June 1, 2026	June 15, 2026

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Program Committee¶

Program Committee Coordination: Qian Zhu (NIH)

Program committee members will be announced soon.

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Acknowledgment¶

The Microsoft CMT service was used for managing the peer-reviewing process for this conference. This service was provided for free by Microsoft and they bore all expenses, including costs for Azure cloud services as well as for software development and support.

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Contact Information¶

Please direct all questions to Asiyah Yu Lin — ontology.world@gmail.com