Ontological Engineering

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Instructor: Barry Smith

Office hours: By appointment via email at phismith@buffalo.edu

The Course

This course is an on-line compilation of video materials from Ontological Engineering 2013 and Ontological Engineering 2014 taught in the University at Buffalo Departments of Philosophy and Industrial Engineering in 2013 and 2014. The course provides an introduction to the methods and uses of ontological engineering, focusing on applications in areas such as military intelligence, healthcare, and document processing. It provides an overview of how ontologies are created and used. It also addresses some of the human factors underlying the success and failure of ontology projects, including issues of ontology governance and dissemination.

The course is built out of fifteen 3-credit-hour sessions.

Background

Ontologies are an important tool in all areas where data is collected and described by different groups in different ways. Ontologies provide taxonomy-based computerized lexica used to describe diverse bodies of data. They thereby help to aggregate and compare data, to make data more easily discoverable, and to allow large bodies of data to be more effectively searched and analyzed. Ontologies also play an important role in the so-called Semantic Web, where the Web Ontology Language (OWL) forms a central building block in the stack of web technology standards created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

UB ontologists are involved in a variety of national and international projects in the military, healthcare, bioscience, transport and financial domains. There is an acknowledged shortage of persons with ontological engineering expertise in all these fields, and in related fields such as journalism, manufacturing and government administration.


1: Introduction to Ontology

  • Ontology: A Brief Introduction
We will begin by addressing questions such as: What is an ontology? What are the differences and interrelations between ontology (philosophy), ontology (science), and ontology (engineering)? How are ontologies used?
Slides
Video
  • Ontology: From Philosophy to Engineering
Slides
Video
  • Ontology as a Solution to the Problem of Data Integration
We are living in a world of big data. To find our way around this world, we need to identify and integrate the data that is important to our needs. The problem is that data is collected always from different perspectives, with different levels of detail, different granularities for example of space and time, and different communities use different technologies and different terminologies when collecting their data. This session provides an introduction to the problems of data fusion.
Slides
Video
  • Tanya Malyuta (CUNY): Ontologies vs. Data Models
Slides
Video
  • Tanya Malyuta (CUNY): Horizontal Integration of Intelligence Data
Slides
Video

2. An Introduction to Basic Formal Ontology

  • Why a standard ontology architecture is needed. Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as domain-neutral common architecture for domain ontologies defined in its terms. BFO and its competitors. Building ontologies with BFO

Background


3. Use of Ontologies in Tracking Systems

Presenter: Werner Ceusters
A referent tracking system (RTS) is a special kind of digital information system that is designed to keep track of both (1) what is the case in reality and (2) what is expressed in other information systems about what is believed to be the case in reality. An RTS also keeps track of how changes in the information system correspond to changes in the reality outside that system. We will provide an introduction to referent tracking and its implementations.
  • Basics of Referent Tracking (RT)
Slides
Video
  • Referent Tracking and Video Surveillance
Slides
Video
  • Referent Tracking and Data Descriptions
Slides
Video

4. How to Build an Ontology

  • How to build an ontology 1
Slides
Video
  • Military ontology
Slides1
Video1
Slides2
Video2
  • How to build an ontology 2
Slides
Video

The Airs Suite of Ontologies and their use in annotating intelligence data. Information artifacts: Publications, databases, passports, emails. The Email Ontology. Minimal Information Checklists

  • An Introduction to BFO's Treatment of Information Artifacts
[http://ncor.buffalo.edu/2013/IE500/21-IAO-and-BFO.pptx Slides
Video

5. Ontology and Information Engineering in the Healthcare Domain

Health care today rests increasingly on the proper use of data deriving from different sources (data pertaining to genes, diseases, symptoms, drugs, medical devices, procedures, hospital infections and other adverse events, hospital management, billing, reporting, and many more). We provide an introduction to the ontology of disease, with special reference to the phenomenon of aging.
  • Ontology for General Medical Science
Slides
Video
  • Informatics and Obamacare
Slides
Video

6. An Overview of Ontology Projects in Military Domains

We will begin with a video Introduction to Semantic Technology in the DoD Business Mission Area by Denis Wisnosky]. We will then describe how ontology is being used for the horizontal integration of warfighter intelligence data within the framework of the US Army’s Distributed Common Ground System Standard Cloud (DSC) initiative. We outline how ontologies are being applied to bring about what we call the ‘semantic enhancement’ of data models used within each intelligence discipline. We then show how the strategy can help to overcome tendencies to stovepiping of intelligence data, and thus to help connecting the dots across different information sources.
  • BFO and the Command Post of the Future
Slides
Video

6. Documents and Document Acts

  • What is a document?
Slides
Video (to be edited)
  • Document Acts and the Ontology of Social Reality
Video
What can we do with documents? What can we do with digital documents that we can't do with paper documents?What is a diagram? How can we extend the technology of optical character recognition (OCR) to comprehend also the graphical content of documents?
  • Reading
Mining images in biomedical publications
Finding and accessing diagrams in biomedical publications

7. The Semantic Web

  • Ontology and the Semantic Web
The term "Semantic Web" was introduced by Tim Berners-Lee and others in the late 1990's (1, 2) and first popularized in a paper in 2001 in Scientific American (see below). Berners-Lee summarizes the idea as "a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines", an extension of the web of documents primarily intended for consumption by people.
Slides
Video

Presentations by Alan Ruttenberg

  • Semantic Web Vision and History
[shttp://ncor.buffalo.edu/2014/IE500/9-Vision-History.pptx Slides]
[1]
  • Technology of the Semantic Web
Slides
Video
  • Ontology and the Semantic Web
Slides
Video

Preliminary Reading and Video Materials