The Conceptual Foundations Group (CFG) is an interest-based research group, centered around clarifying foundational concepts relating to information organization, data curation, and semantic technologies. Concepts related to the fundamental nature of information, descriptive metadata, digital objects, and text markup are frequent topics. The group emphasizes the application of “formal methods” — that is, approaches that originated in logic, philosophy of language, and analytic philosophy – to information science problem areas.

For example, some topics that were recently discussed during our group’s meetings include:
– taxonomy alignment on classification systems
– knowledge graphs and semantic computing
– data curation
– the politics and biases in metadata
– the analysis of the relation between information and its physical substrates
– formalization of collections
– Virtual machines, workflows, provenance, archive files, widgets and information modeling
– What’s in a definition?
– Using controlled natural language for knowledge representation
– Hierarchy of hypothesis
– Drug-drug interaction ontologies
– FRBR
– Knowledge graphs and text mining in the biomedical domain
– JSON-LD
– Compositionality of reproducibility

For the Fall 2023 semester, we meet every week on Thursdays, from 10:00 am – 11:00 am (CDT) online at Zoom. Emails about our weekly talks will usually be distributed one week before the meeting, via our mailing list, check your emails often for updates on meeting descriptions, locations, zoom call links, etc!

Join us if you’re interested!

To subscribe to the CFG mailing list, you can either:
(1) Visit this page https://lists.ischool.illinois.edu/lists/info/cfg , click Subscribe on the left-hand side, and enter your email address; OR
(2) Send an email to lists@ischool.illinois.edu with the subject line subscribe cfg.