Ontological Engineering
Title: PHI 598 / IE 500: Ontological Engineering, Spring 2018.
Registration:
- Class#: 23854 (PHI)
- Class#: 23450 (ENG)
- Off-campus students: Registration details are provided under Part Time/Graduate here.
Instructor: Barry Smith
Office hours: By appointment via email at phismith@buffalo.edu
The Course
The aim of the course is to provide an introduction to the methods and uses of ontological engineering, focusing on applications in areas such as military intelligence, healthcare, and document processing. It will provide an overview of how ontologies are created and used, together with practical experience in the development of ontologies and in the use of associated web technology standards. It will also address 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, each consisting of an on-line video lectures, video presentations created by students, and discussion sessions covering the topics of each lecture.
Text: Robert Arp, Barry Smith and Andrew Spear, Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, August 2015
Further readings and examples of video lectures from previous courses are provided below
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).
Ontology in Buffalo: UB ontologists are involved in a variety of national and international projects in the military, healthcare, bioscience, engineering, 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. UB ontologists also work closely with CUBRC, a Buffalo research, development, testing and systems integration company specializing in the areas of Data Science and Information Fusion; Chemical, Biological and Medical Sciences; and Aeronautics.
Provisional list of topics to be addressed
- 1. Introduction to Ontology and the Semantic Web
- 2. Big Data and How to Overcome the Problems it Causes
- 3. Ontology, AI and Robotics
- 4. Services, Commodities, Infrastructure
- 5. Product Life Cycle Ontology
- 6. Ontology and Information Engineering in the Healthcare Domain
- 7. The Science of Document Informatics
- 8. Finance Ontology
- 9. The Ontology of Plans
- 10. Ontology of Military Logistics
- 11. Ontology and Intelligence Analysis
- 12. Ontology and Data Fusion
- 13. Ontology of Terrorism
- 14. Presentations of Student Projects 1
- 15. Presentations of Student Projects 2
Sample videos
- Ontology: A Brief Introduction
- Ontology: From Philosophy to Engineering
- Ontology as a Solution to the Problem of Data Integration
- Object Based Production (OBP): Use of Ontologies in Tracking Systems
- Basics of Referent Tracking (RT)
- Slides
- Video
- Referent Tracking and Video Surveillance
- Slides
- Video
- Referent Tracking and Data Descriptions
- Slides
- Video
- Military ontology
- 4. How to Integrate Data Slides Video
- 5. Military Ontology Slides Video
- 6. Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) Slides Video
- 17. Barry Smith: Space, Time and BFO Slides Video
- 18. LTC William Mandrick LTC Mandrick]: Roots of Ontology in the Military Slides Video
- 19. LTC Mandrick: Operational Ontology: The Future of the Military Decision Making Process (MDMP) Slides Video
- 20. Ron Rudnicki: The CUBRC - US Army Ontology Collaboration Slides Video
6. Documents and Document Acts
- What is a document?
- Document Acts and the Ontology of Social Reality
- 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
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.
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
- Ontology and the Semantic Web
- Tim Berners Lee Scientific American Articles :
