Formal Ontology
(Preliminary details)
Title: PHI 549 Applied Ontology
Faculty: Barry Smith
Registration: Details will be provided in due course. You can find preliminary orientation here under Part Time/Graduate.
Course Structure: This will be a three credit hour on-line graduate seminar. It will be taught on Mondays from January 30 to May 8, 2017. Links to course videos will be provided each Sunday at 9am. Students will be required to watch the video class some time within 48 hours. In each week starting on Monday at 9am class participants will be able to post questions, discussion comments and responses to the class email forum. 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: An ontology is a structured collection of terms used to tag data with the goal of making data deriving from heterogeneous sources become more easily searchable, comparable or combinable. Ontology is an important tool of data analysis, used in a wide variety of application areas from biomedicine to cyberwarfare. The course will provide an introduction to ontology from an application oriented point of view, focusing on the identification and use of best practices for ontology development, and on the development of plug-and-play ontology modules for re-use in different areas.
Example Ontologies:
Text: Robert Arp, Barry Smith and Andrew Spear, Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, August 2015
Further readings are provided here: http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/
Example videos are provided here: https://www.youtube.com/user/hxo3nql/playlists
Requirements: This course is open to all persons with an undergraduate degree and some relevant experience (for example in data science, terminology research, logic, philosophy). In order to receive a grade and course credit students will be required to have reviewed in a timely manner all provided videos and any accompanying recommended reading. Grading will be on the basis of contributions to the on-line class discussion forum and on the quality and content of a 20 minute youtube video (with accompanying essay and powerpoint slide deck) on some topic in the field of applied ontology. Each student will be required to create one such video for presentation in the final class session on May 8. Examples of student videos created in comparable classes in the past are available here and here.
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
