Applied Ontology, Spring 2022
Title: PHI 637 Applied Ontology, Spring 2022
Faculty: Barry Smith
Registration: Class #24730. Non-UB persons should go to this page
Course Structure: This will be a graduate seminar taught primarily online and asynchronously. The course can be taken in either a 2- or a 3-credit hour version. All students are required to
- 1. prepare a simple ontology file in Protege on a topic of your choice
- 2. follow the videos released at 1pm on Monday afternoon of each week
- 3. create 3 questions each week and post these questions to the class listserv; the questions should identify issues relevant to each week's videos but not answered in those videos
- 4. contribute to the class listserv discussions provoked by these questions
Students taking the class for 2 credits must in addition:
- 1 create a paper of at least 1,000 words on a topic relevant to the course, topic to be discussed with Dr Smith
Students taking the class for 3 credits must in addition:
- 1. create successive drafts of a paper of at least 3,000 words on a topic relevant to the course, topic and drafts to be discussed with Dr Smith
- 2. create a powerpoint slide summarizing the main theses of your paper
- 3. present the powerpoint slides in the final class session
Course Description: An ontology is a structured controlled vocabulary used primarily for tagging data in a way that will allow the data to be shared between different communities. The course will provide an introduction to ontology from an application oriented point of view, focusing on best practices for the development and use of ontologies, and providing plenty of examples. The course will be open to all students with an undergraduate degree. No prior knowledge of ontologies is required.
Schedule The link to the course video for any given week will be provided at 9am on the corresponding Monday (as listed below). Students are required to watch the video within 48 hours of this posting. Class participants are required to post to the class email forum questions, responses and discussion comments relating to the video from the relevant week.
Students should familiarize themselves with the Protege software tool, which can be downloaded from here.
Tutorials and other supporting material can be found here. Other potentially useful tutorials can be found on youtube, including:
January 31: Introduction to Ontology
- Video
- Slides
- A brief history of ontology
- Semantically enhanced publishing
- GO: The most successful ontology thus far
- Aristotle's Metaphysics and Categories
- The Ontological Square
- Granular partitions
- Aristotle vs. Kant
The Ontology of Social Reality
- Video
- Slides
- Speech acts
- The money in your bank account
- War and chess
- Debts
- Institutions
- Searle's naturalism and its problems
- Objects vs. representations
- Hernando de Soto and The Mystery of Capital
- Ontology of the credit crunch
February 7: Introduction to Applied Ontology
The first part of a series presented in the University at Buffalo in January 2018:
Introduction to Ontology for Systems Engineers (first part of a series presented in the University at Buffalo in January 2018):
NAVAIR, NAVSEA and SPAWAR, the three Navy Systems Commands, initiated a Systems Engineering Transformation (SET) designed to introduce model-based systems engineering into all aspects of their work. Given the extremely broad scope of this project the immense number and complexity of models to be generated experiments were made to explore the use ontology as a means of enhancing consistency and discoverability of models and their contents.
On September 19, 2018 a meeting of the Navy SYSCOMs on the proposed ontology was held in Washington DC, at which Barry Smith delivered two lectures as follows:
1: Three ways ontologies fail – with lessons learned for the Navy Systems Engineering Transformation
2: Ontology for Product Lifecycle Management, or: how to use ontologies to build and fly a plane
February 14: Ontology and Artificial Intelligence
Ontology of Language, Ontology of Terrorism, Ontology of Obligations Video
Driverless Philosophy
Feb 21: Towards a Standard Upper Level Ontology
ISO/IEC 21838 Top-Level Ontology
Since this video was created both parts 1 and 2 have been approved through the ISO process. Background material can be found here
Reading: Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology
Feb 24: Face-to-Face Question-and-Answer Session
Feb 28: Basic Formal Ontology
BFO Tutorial
Realizable Entities in Basic Formal Ontology
Temporalized Relations
Ontology as Product-Service System
Reading: Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology
Mar 7: Drill
- 3-credit students submit draft title and abstract of essay
Joint Doctrine Ontology
Building an Ethical Warfighter
- Slides
- Video
- (From the Symposium on Military Codes of Ethics, held in Buffalo, November 2015)
Ontology of Terrorism
Massively Planned Social Agency
Command and Control
Mar 14: Biodiversity Ontology
- Mar 21 Spring Recess
Mar 28 Applied Ontology in Biology and Medicine
April 4: Ontology of Military Domains
- 3-credit students submit short draft version of essay
Apr 11: Ontology and Intelligence Analysis
Apr 18: Applied Ontology with AI
Apr 25: Ontology of Military Domains
May 2: Ontology of Intelligence Analysis
May 9: 1-3pm: Student video presentations
- 3-credit students submit final version of essay
Background Materials
Text: Robert Arp, Barry Smith and Andrew Spear, Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, August 2015
Further readings are provided here: http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/
Requirements:
- This course is open to all persons with an undergraduate degree and some relevant experience (for example in philosophy, data science or information engineering).
- No prior knowledge of ontology is required.
In order to receive a grade and course credit students will be required to have reviewed in a timely manner all provided videos and any accompanying recommended reading and provided questions in response. Grading will be on the basis of contributed questions, contributions to the on-line class discussions prompted by these questions, and quality of any written work, powerpoint, youtube or Protege material.
Each 3 credit hour student will be required to create one such video for presentation in the final class session. Examples of student videos created in comparable classes in the past are available here and here.
- Your video should be 20 minutes long; it will be graded on the basis of clarity and force of argument, interestingness of content, and quality of delivery, including response to questions.
- The video should be based on a powerpoint presentation of approximately 20 slides. The slides should provide a minimal amount of text (using 24 point font or above), together with accompanying graphics, for example charts representing data. You should not read the slides -- rather, you should use the slides as summaries of the successive points you want to make, and present these points ex tempore.
All class participants should communicate by email with Dr Smith to determine topic of your written essay.
Grading will be determined as follows:
All students:
- 1. submitted questions (33%)
- 2. contributions to email discussions (33%)
- 3. essay (33%)
3-credit hour students
- 1. submitted questions (20%)
- 2. contributions to email discussions (20%)
- 3. essay (30%)
- 4. powerpoint (10%)
- 5. presentation (20%)
- 4. essay on the topic of their video presentation; length (for graduate students): ca. 3000 words; (for undergraduate students): ca. 1500 words
For policy regarding incompletes see here
For academic integrity policy see here
