Co-located with MODELS 2026.

The onto:Nexus Workshop—formally known as the International Workshop on Ontological Modeling and Analysis—serves as a premier platform for the R&D community to present peer-reviewed, original research. The workshop champions innovative approaches in the field by showcasing work that applies formal methods for enhanced rigor, integrates DevOps practices to boost agility, and leverages AI techniques to automate activities in ontological modeling and analysis.

This edition of the workshop aims to bring together a rich set of researchers, practitioners, and tool-builders focused on ontological modelling and analysis, as applied to model-based software and systems engineering.

The secondary objective is to highlight novel and ongoing work in ontological modelling and analysis. With the resurgence of ontological techniques across domains and disciplines, there is a need for a workshop-level venue for promoting early-stage research, fundamental contributions, and applications to case studies.

• Friday July 3, 2026: Abstract submission
• Friday July 10, 2026: Paper submission
• Friday August 7, 2026: Notification of acceptance
• Friday August 14, 2026: Camera-ready submission

• Ontological modeling methods and methodologies, analysis tools, and processes for model-based software or systems engineering
• Ontological modeling best practices and guidelines, case studies, and benchmarks
• Creation of ontologies through collaboration, machine learning techniques, or other approaches
• Tooling for ontological modeling and analysis
• Empirical studies on the use of ontologies in MBSE
• Intersections between ontologies and formal methods
• Organizational and governance aspects of ontological modeling
• Semantic interoperability in software and/or systems
• AI for onto. modeling/analysis, and onto. modeling/analysis for AI
• Human-in-the-Loop: integrating human behavior into ontological modeling

The following types of papers are invited for submission:

• Regular Papers: Up to 10 pages — Novel research contributions or innovative applications.
• Short and Tool Papers: Up to 5 pages — Vision papers, tool descriptions, demonstrations, or case studies.
• Industry Short Talks: Up to 2 pages — Open to all industry practitioners.

Submit your paper via the onto:Nexus Workshop 2026 EasyChair website.

All submissions must comply with the IEEE formatting instructions..

Submissions will undergo a single-blind review process, with each paper reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. Reviewers will assess the relevance, clarity, and potential to stimulate engaging discussion at the workshop. Accepted papers will be published by IEEE in the joint workshop proceedings.

Submissions must not be under review or submitted elsewhere concurrently. Violation of this policy — as explicitly outlined by both IEEE and ACM — will be considered a breach of scientific ethics, and appropriate actions will be taken.

Important update on ACM's new open access publishing model for 2026 ACM Conferences!

Starting January 1, 2026, ACM has fully transitioned to Open Access. All ACM publications, including those from ACM-sponsored conferences, will be 100% Open Access. Authors will have two primary options for publishing Open Access articles with ACM: the ACM Open institutional model or by paying Article Processing Charges (APCs). To find out whether an APC applies to your article, please consult the list of participating institutions in ACM Open.

Understanding that this change could present financial challenges, ACM has approved a temporary subsidy of 65% for 2026. The subsidy will offer:

• $250 APC for ACM/SIG members
• $350 for non-members

Note for this workshop: extended abstracts will be covered by a specific agreement with MODELS and will be published open-access free of charge.

• 
  Maged Elaasar, Modelware, USA
• 
  Bentley Oakes, Polytechnique Montréal, Canada
• 
  Wahab Hamou-Lhadj, Concordia University, Canada
• 
  Mohammad Hamdaqa, Polytechnique Montréal, Canada
• 
  Eduard Kamburjan, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark

• Daniel Amyot, University of Ottawa, Canada
• Joe Gregory, University of Arizona, USA
• Jameleddine Hassine, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada
• Yuta Nakajima, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Japan
• Ahsan Qamar, Ford Motor Company, USA
• Sophia Salas Cordero, ISAE-SUPAERO, France
• Avi Shaked, University of Oxford, UK
• Bianca Wiesmayr, Ulm University, Germany

Towards Unified Process Descriptions for Monitoring, Executing, Verifying and Governing Behaviour
Andreas Harth, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and Fraunhofer IIS, Germany

Abstract: Ontologies provide well-understood formal means for uniform knowledge representation. Web architecture can add somewhat uniform network interfaces to systems. But neither ontologies nor web architecture provide a comprehensive description of behaviour. Formal means for describing behaviour, in the same representation and on the same interface abstractions, could support monitoring, execution, verification and compliance tasks. The talk presents building blocks for such descriptions. These include a process vocabulary with occurrences, Linked Data-Fu for monitoring and execution over read-write Linked Data, SaVeWoT for model checking Web of Things systems and a trace-based semantics for ODRL policies. Over the years, behaviour has been studied from many angles, but the results remain fractured. Knowledge representation was once fractured, too, until web architecture provided a common substrate. The talk argues that behaviour descriptions can similarly benefit from the same substrate.

Biography: Andreas Harth holds the Chair of Technical Information Systems at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and leads the Data Spaces and Internet of Things Solutions department at Fraunhofer IIS in Nuremberg. His research addresses large-scale interoperation in hyperlinked networked systems, with a focus on modelling and executing behaviour in the way ontologies model and integrate data. He completed his PhD at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), National University of Ireland, Galway, and his habilitation at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) on link traversal and reasoning in dynamic Linked Data knowledge bases. He served as General Chair of ESWC 2020, co-organised Dagstuhl seminars on Agents on the Web and sits on the editorial board of Transactions on Graph Data and Knowledge.

The workshop is organized as a full day, opening with the keynote, followed by presentations of the accepted papers and the open discussion that remains the workshop's primary purpose. Times are TBA.