Basic Formal Ontology 2.0

DATE'

Saturday and Sunday, August 18-19, 2012.

VENUE

Room14A, Basement, Baldy Hall, University at Buffalo North Campus.

DESCRIPTION

Basic Formal Ontology is currently being used by over 100 ontology-based research projects in biomedical informatics and increasingly in other fields. The course will provide an introduction to the content and use of BFO in ontology development. Attendees will acquire knowledge of the ontology and of its use as top-level ontology in multiple ontology development projects in a variety of fields. They will learn about the most recent developments in the ontology and acquire basic knowledge of the new formalizations of BFO in first-order logic (FOL) and in OWL.

SCHEDULE

Saturday, August 18: 9am-5pm

• The main idea of BFO
• The development of BFO 2.0
• The BFO architecture

Instances and universals

Continuants and occurrents

Dependence and independence

Generic dependence and information entities

Processes and process profiles

Sunday, August 19: 9am-5pm

• Examples of uses of BFO
• Creating a domain ontology by extending BFO
• BFO in First Order Logic
• BFO in OWL

Uses of BFO in OWL

• Concluding discussion

PARTICIPATION

Participants should have some background in ontology (including either philosophical or applied ontology). No specific knowledge of BFO is presupposed. This tutorial allows both face-to-face and on-line participation. Participation may be for credit (with an official university transcript), or the tutorial may be audited (with a certificate of completion if needed). The course will take place on the weekend of August 18-19, 2012, with follow-up meetings as necessary for those taking the course for credit.

FOR CREDIT

Participation in this tutorial will yield 1 credit hour; up to 3 further credit hours for thie course can be received through completion of a project under the guidance of an assigned faculty member. Projects must be completed before November 30, 2012.

Course credits can be applied to the UB Masters and PhD Programs in Ontology. The University plans also an on-line Advanced Graduate Certificate Program in Ontology, to which credits for this course will also be applicable. Further details can be obtained from Barry Smith

Registration details for University at Buffalo (UB) students are here.

Registration details for external (non-UB) participants are here; to find the course details go to Browse by Department, then to Philosophy, then scroll to the bottom of the page.

AUDITING

Auditing, both on-line and face-to-face, is free to pre-registered participants. All those wishing to register as auditors should contact Barry Smith as soon as possible.

FACULTY

Barry Smith is a prominent contributor to both theoretical and applied research in ontology. He is the author of some 500 publications on ontology and related topics, and his research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the US, Swiss and Austrian National Science Foundations, the US Department of Defense, the Volkswagen Foundation, and the European Union. In 2010 he was awarded the first Paolo Bozzi Prize in Ontology by the University of Turin.

Smith is SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Director of the National Center for Ontological Research in the University at Buffalo, where he is also Adjunct Professor in the Departments of Neurology and of Computer Science. Smith’s work on the science of ontology contributed to the establishment of the OBO (Open Biomedical Ontologies) Foundry, a set of resources designed to support information-driven research in biology and biomedicine. Smith is one of the principal scientists of the NIH National Center for Biomedical Ontology, a Scientific Advisor to the Gene Ontology Consortium, and a PI on the Protein Ontology and Infectious Disease Ontology projects. He has organized over 100 ontology conferences, workshops and tutorials.

FURTHER INFORMATION Background information concerning BFO is available here. For introductory reading see: Pierre Grenon and Barry Smith: "SNAP and SPAN: Towards Dynamic Spatial Ontology", Spatial Cognition and Computation, 4: 1 (March 2004), 69-103 For further information please write to Barry Smith.