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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

Buffalo Ontology Group Meeting, IHI, Buffalo, January 27, 2014, 4-6pm

Ontology and Imaging Informatics, Buffalo, NY, June 23-25, 2014

Information Artifact Ontologies, Workshop organized as part of the FOIS 2014 Conference, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, September 22, 2014

Studying Ontology in Buffalo

Areas of Study

Careers in ontology

News

ImmPort: A Guide for Submitters, workshop organized in conjunction with Rho Federal Systems Division, Chapel Hill, NC, October 9-10, 2013

Advantages of the 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

Tutorial: Information Ontologies for the Intelligence Community, [http://stids.c4i.gmu.edu STIDS Conference, November 11-13, 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.

The Philosophome

Philosophome Website

Philosophome Wiki

Semantics of Biodiversity

"Semantics in Support of Biodiversity Knowledge Discovery" (PLoS ONE, 2013)

Video Presentations from Semantics of Biodiversity Workshop (2012)

Day 1: Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Video: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrHYi7mgF9g">AM 1</a>, Barry Smith

• Ontologies as method of viewing data neutrally
• Analogies to biomedical domain
• Other ontologies we can learn from
  

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fot1dOPLv_c">AM 2</a>, Barry Smith

• Basic Formal Ontology
• Continuants/ Occurrents
• Types and relations
  

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWy3C0WmpZM">PM 1</a>, Barry Smith

• How to build an ontology with BFO
• Example with measurements in biomedical domain
  

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaG92j0WqmI">PM 2</a>, Barry Smith

• Tracking referents
• Instance Unique Identifiers (IUI's)
  

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHP0Dlk5wuo">PM 3</a>, Barry Smith

• Tracking changes in our understanding of reality
• Reality vs. beliefs
• Sources of error
• Reconciling different views of reality
• The Information Artifact Ontology

Day 2: Thursday, May 17, 2012

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FA8eJOeV-Z4">Video: Darwin Core Summary</a>, John Wieczorek, UC Berkeley

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiICcMbE2Ik">Germplasm Extension</a>, Dag Endresen, Global Biodiversity Information Facility

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAbvBFIY35o">Darwin-SW</a>, Joel Sachs, TDWG RDF Interest Group

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mVZz7ZNavU">The Environment Ontology</a>, Norman Morrison, University of Manchester, UK

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Of6bj28MQhY">Darwin Core and Basic Formal Ontology (putting it all together + wrapup)</a> , Barry Smith

• Building Darwin Core top-down in BFO
• Organisms, photographs, media
• How to re-use ontologies
• Principles of singular nouns, secondary use, understandability
• Writing good definitions (DwC Examples)
• Management Strategies
• Ontologies of relevance for reuse (BFO, EnvO, IDO, OBI, Plant Ontology , Uberon, IAO)
• Educational Resources (OBI, Protege, BFO)

<a href="http://youtu.be/rumlDesLtV0">Participant discussion and breakout group organization for Friday</a>, Bob Robbins, University of California, San Diego

Day 3: Breakout Groups, Friday May 18, 2012

<a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tF2rVxATUo8hxOifuucQ4LJAIK4Hz88fPkpw5wKyTKo/edit">Individual Breakouts document</a>

(with links to DwC/BFO, Governance, relations, and Testbed groups)

Post-Workshop References

<a href="http://bioportal.bioontology.org/ontologies/47531">DwC Ontology in BioPortal</a> - The beginnings of this Ontology was sketched during the last day of the workshop and subsequently added to BioPortal.

<a href="http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/">Darwin Core Terms Reference</a> - An up to date list of darwin core terms.

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Military and Intelligence Ontology

JFCOM: Semantic Web and Joint Training (2010)

Semantic Enhancement for DSGS-A: Distributed Development of a Shared Semantic Resource (2012-13)

Suggested Reading

Ontology: An Introduction

Coordinated Evolution of Biomedical Ontologies

Avoiding Perspective-Relative Silos

Universal Core Semantic Layer

Training Videos

Ontology for Intelligence, Defense and Security

A Repeatable Process for Ontology Development

Avoiding Semantic Stovepipes: Five Ontological Principles for Interoperability

War-Fighter Ontology