Ontological Engineering
Title: PHI 598 / IE 500: Ontological Engineering (Online class), 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 this 3-credit-hour 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 sessions, 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
- 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
- What is a document?
- Document Acts and the Ontology of Social Reality
- Ontology and the Semantic Web
Background
Guidance for Presentations and Reports
- Examples of what to include
- Statement of scope of the ontology
- The true path rule
- Identification of existing ontologies
- Explanation of how your ontology differs from (or incorporates) these
- Screenshots of parts of the ontology with some examples of important terms and definitions
- Summaries of potential applications of the ontology
- Evaluation
- Completeness
Grading and Related Policies and Services
All students will be required to take an active part in class discussions throughout the semester. In addition they will be required to design and complete an ontology project, including written description, and brief presentation of the project in class. Students enrolled in the practical segment will be required to create a Protégé file to accompany their ontology project, and also to complete quizzes designed to gauge developing competence in the use of the Protégé Ontology Editor and SPARQL query language.
For 3 credit hour students, your grade will be determined in five equal portions deriving from:
- 1. class participation (1.5% per class attended),
- 2. results of two quizzes relating to the lab portion of the course
- 3. written description of ontology project (3000 words; deadline December 2),
- 4. Protégé ontology file (deadline November 25),
- 5. class presentation.
For 2 credit hour students, your grade is determined as follows:
- 1. class participation (1.5% per class attended),
- 2. written description of ontology project (4000 words; deadline December 2) (50%),
- 3. class presentation (30%).
For policy regarding incompletes see here
For academic integrity policy see here
For accessibility services see here
