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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, 2013
OBO Foundry 101: Collaborative ontology development, tool support and semantic web, Montreal. Co-located with the Fourth International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies (ICBO2013)
- July 7, 2013
Workshop on Definitions in Ontologies, Montreal. Co-located with the Fourth International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies (ICBO2013)
- July 10, 2013
OGMS Workshop, co-located with ICBO 2013, Montreal. Co-located with the Fourth International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies (ICBO2013)
- July 10, 2013
BFO 2.0 Meeting, Montreal. Co-located with the Fourth International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies (ICBO2013)
Past Events
Studying Ontology in Buffalo
News
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
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
Coordinated Evolution of Biomedical Ontologies
Avoiding Perspective-Relative Silos
Ontology Videos by William Mandrick
A Repeatable Process for Ontology Development
Avoiding Semantic Stovepipes: Five Ontological Principles for Interoperability
