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The goal of the National Center for Ontological Research is to advance ontological investigation within the United States. NCOR serves as a vehicle to coordinate, to enhance, to publicize, and to seek funding for ontological research activities. It lays a special focus on ontology training and on the establishment of tools and measures for quality assurance of ontologies. NCOR provides ontology services to multiple organizations, including the US Department of Defense.

Events

• April 18, 2013 - Thursday, 9am-5pm

Ontologies for Information Integration, Buffalo, April 18, 2013. Please write to Jillian Pugliese for registration details. Press coverage of this event

The challenges of big data for military, security and intelligence domains

Military Intelligence Tries To Tame Data 'Monster'

• May 13-14, 2013

Basic Formal Ontology Meeting, Buffalo. Please write to Barry Smith for registration details.

• May 15-16, 2013

PRO-PO-GO Ontology Workshop, Buffalo. Please write to Barry Smith for registration details.

• June 10-14, 2013

Summer School for Quantitative Systems Immunology, Institute for Computing and Computational Science and Engineering, Boston University, Boston, MA. For session on Immunology Ontology by Lindsay Cowell and Barry Smith, Tuesday June 11, 2013 see here.

• July 7-9, 2013

OBO Foundry 101: Collaborative ontology development, tool support and semantic web, Montreal. Co-located with the Fourth International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies (ICBO2013)

News

Advantages of Financial Report Ontology in Accounting Research

UB Ontologists Win Bioinformatics Integration Award to Support National Institutes of Health

Announcing Clinical and Translational Science Ontology Affinity Group

Information Overload in the Era of Big Data

Botanists building ontologies to cope with information overload

UB Applied Informatics Portal unveiled.

Tutorials and Courses

How to Develop and Use OBO Foundry Ontologies, Tutorial and Workshop at ICBO, Graz, Austria, July 21, 2012

Basic Formal Ontology 2.0: Tutorial at ICBO/FOIS, Graz, Austria, July 25, 2012

Introduction to Protégé, Tutorial, Buffalo, NY, August 11-12, 2012

Basic Formal Ontology 2.0, Tutorial, Buffalo, NY, August 18-19, 2012

Problems in Ontology, Class, Buffalo, NY, Mondays from 4-6pm, August 29 - December 5, 2012

Ontological Engineering, Class, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University at Buffalo, NY, Mondays from 4-7pm, August 26 - December 2, 2013

Defining Ontology

An ontology is a representation of some part of reality, (e.g. medicine, social reality, physics, etc.). Smith states that: “Ontology is the science of what is, of the kinds and structures of objects, properties, events, processes and relations in every area of reality…Ontology seeks to provide a definitive and exhaustive classification of entities in all spheres of being.”1 To be an accurate representation of reality an ontology includes the types of entities and events in a given domain (along with their definitions) arranged in a hierarchical structure, along with relations (such as part-of, depends-on, caused-by, etc. where necessary). Ontologies enable the formulation of robust and shareable descriptions of a given domain by providing a common controlled vocabulary for doctrine writers, IT Developers, and war-fighters alike, thereby allowing these disparate communities to communicate with each other. An ontology should be a shared resource between communities, and its continued collaborative development should support the integration of information and facilitate knowledge discovery.2 These two goals are realized by ensuring wide dissemination of the ontology, so that it will be used by many stakeholders, and its terms will be correspondingly familiar and readily used for search.

Documents

Semantic Enhancement: Distributed Development of a Shared Semantic Resource

Suggested Reading

Ontology: An Introduction

Coordinated Evolution of Biomedical Ontologies

Avoiding Perspective-Relative Silos

Universal Core Semantic Layer

Ontology Videos by William Mandrick

A Repeatable Process for Ontology Development

Avoiding Semantic Stovepipes: Five Ontological Principles for Interoperability

War-Fighter Ontology

William Mandrick