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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
Future
The meeting will take place in the Jeannette Martin Room, 567 Capen Hall, from 4-6pm.
José M. Parente de Oliveira (ITA Brazil): "A Visual Formalism for BFO-Based Ontologies" (for abstract see below)
Mark Jensen (United Nations Environment Programme): "The UNEP Sustainable Development Goals Interface Ontology (SDGIO)"
A Visual Formalism for BFO-Based Ontologies
José M. Parente de Oliveira
Standard graphical representations of ontologies are flawed because the representation of non-hierarchical relations lacks appropriate support. In particular, the graphical representation of specialization and whole-part, as well as quality and dependency relationships are poorly represented. In consequence, graphical representations fail to provide the needed synoptic view of how the represented elements are interrelated. I will show how we can use the Higraph visual formalism [[1],[2]] to represent domain ontologies based on BFO in a way that will provide visual representations that are both clearer and more concise. More specifically, the idea is to pursue ways to represent in a more concise and intuitive way the following aspects of BFO ontologies: Generalization/ specialization relationships Whole-part relationships Qualities Dependency relationships among entities Occurrent and related entities Future steps will include the exploration of using Higraph to support visual inference over content using BFO-conformant ontologies. Dr Parente will be visiting UB until March 2017 on a sabbatical fellowship. He is Associate Professor of Computer Science and Deputy Dean for Graduate Education and Research at the Brazilian Aeronautics Institute of Technology (ITA). His research is in the areas of command and control (C2) and situation awareness, knowledge representation, ontology engineering, semantic computing and the Semantic Web. He has also worked on cancer data mining, ontology-based tutoring, and e-government.
[1] Harel, D. On Visual Formalisms. [2] Power, J. and Tourlas, K. Abstraction in Reasoning about Higraph-Based Systems
May 19-20, 2016
Ontological Approaches to Sensor Data Analysis, Amherst, NY
September 7-8, 2016 CTS Ontology Workshop 2016, Clinical Terminology Shock and Awe, Buffalo, NY
Past
March 21, 2016, 141 Park Hall
- Fabian Neuhaus will talk on DOL: The Distributed Ontology Language"
Feb 2 and all Tuesdays until April 19 1-3:50pm, 141 Park Hall
- A series of seminars on various ontology-related topics, listed here.
Feb. 1, 2016, 567 Capen Hall Meeting on various ontology topics, including:
- Non-Coding RNA Ontology (Alan Ruttenberg)
- Ontology for Manufacturing (Francesco Furini)
- We propose an ontology focused on the representation of composite materials in general and what are called 'Functionally Graded Materials' (FGM) in particular. The scope of the ontology is to provide information about the components of such materials, the manufacturing processes involved in creating such materials, and different sorts of applications in dentistry and other fields. The ontology is developed using Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and parts of of Ontology for Biomedical Investigation (OBI).
- Plant Life Cycle Ontology (Barry Smith)
Meeting on Current UB Ontology Projects, IHI, 3pm, December 14, 2015
Information Meeting on Joint Doctrine Ontology, Herndon, VA 20171, September 16-17, 2015
The Role of Ontology in Big Cancer Data, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD, May 12-13, 2015
CTS Ontology Workshop 2015, Ontology in Practice. The Fourth Clinical and Translational Science Ontology Workshop. Charleston, SC, September 23-25, 2015
Symposium on Military Codes of Ethics, Buffalo, NY 14260, November 2, 2015
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.
Courses
Problems in Ontology, Department of Philosophy, University at Buffalo, NY, Mondays from 4-6pm, August 29 - December 5, 2012
Ontological Engineering, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University at Buffalo, NY, Fall 2013
Ontological Engineering, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Department of Computer Science and Department of Philosophy University at Buffalo, NY, Mondays from 4-7pm, August 25 - December 1, 2014
Analytical Metaphysics, Department of Philosophy, University at Buffalo, NY, Tuesdays 1-3:50pm, Spring Semester, 2016
Tutorials
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
Tutorial: Information Ontologies for the Intelligence Community, [http://stids.c4i.gmu.edu STIDS Conference, November 11, 2013
Tutorial: Ontology of Military Planning and Operations Assessment, STIDS Conference, November 18, 2014
Tutorial: Basic Formal Ontology 2015, International Conference on Biomedical Ontology, Lisbon, 2015
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
Semantics of Biodiversity
Paper: Semantics in Support of Biodiversity Knowledge Discovery (PLoS ONE, 2013)
Video Presentations from: Semantics of Biodiversity Workshop (2012)
- 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 for reuse (BFO, EnvO, IDO, OBI, Plant Ontology , Uberon, IAO)
- Educational resources (OBI, Protege, BFO)
Finance and Economics
Barry Smith and Wolfgang Grassl, [http://www.slideshare.net/BarrySmith3/an-application-of-bfo-to-services An Application of Basic Formal Ontology to the Ontology of Services and Commodities�] Institute for Business Informatics, University of Koblenz, Germany July 23, 2013
Barry Smith, Reference Data Integration: A Strategy for the Future, Financial Reference Data Management Conference (FIMA), New York, March 2012
Military and Intelligence Ontology
JFCOM: Semantic Web and Joint Training (2010)
I2WD: Semantic Enhancement for DSGS-A: Distributed Development of a Shared Semantic Resource (2012-13)
I2WD: PED Fusion via Enterprise Ontology
Common Core Ontologies (preliminary statement)
Ontology of Planning
Ontology of Engineering
Bob Young: Towards a Reference Ontology for Manufacturing (2016)
Engineering Life Cycle Ontology
Ontology for Clinical and Translational Science
Clinical and Translational Science Ontology Group
Suggested Reading
Coordinated Evolution of Biomedical Ontologies
Avoiding Perspective-Relative Silos
Training Videos
Ontology for Intelligence, Defense and Security
A Repeatable Process for Ontology Development
Avoiding Semantic Stovepipes: Five Ontological Principles for Interoperability
