Formal Ontology 2017
Preliminary details
Course Title: PHI 547 Formal Ontology Faculty: Barry Smith Date and Time: This course is an on-line course to be taught on Mondays from January 30 to May 8, 2017. Registered students will be assumed to have watched the course videos the URLs for which will be provided in advance of each week's class (which will be assumed to take place in the interval from 4 to 6pm). The final session or sessions (depending on the number of class participants) will consist in youtube videos (ca 20 minutes in length) created by the students in the class.
Course Description: The course will provide an introduction to formal ontology from both a philosophical and an application oriented point of view. Ontologies to be considered will include:
- Basic Formal Ontology
- Information Artifact Ontology
- Gene Ontology
- OBO (Open Biomedical Ontologies) Foundry
- The Environment Ontology
- Referent Tracking
- 'http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3104413/ The Methodology of Ontological Realism]
Text: Robert Arp, Barry Smith and Andrew Spear, Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, August 2015, xxiv + 220pp. Freely available to UB persons under MIT Press Scholarship Online.
Further readings are provided here: http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/ Example videos are provided here: https://www.youtube.com/user/hxo3nql/playlists
Grading: Students will be graded on the basis of their contributions to the on-line class discussion forum and by a 20 minute youtube video (with accompanying essay and powerpoint slide deck) on some topic in the field of formal ontology. These videos will be assembled for presentation at the end of the semester. Grading will be based on:
- 1. forum participation (25%)
- 2. 20 minute youtube video (25%)
- 3. associated powerpoint slides (25%)
- 4. associated essay (25%)
For policy regarding incompletes see here
For academic integrity policy see here
For accessibility services see here
