Formal Ontology
(Preliminary details)
Course Title: PHI 547 Formal Ontology
Faculty: Barry Smith
Date and Time: This will be a three credit hour on-line graduate seminar to be taught on Mondays from January 30 to May 8, 2017. Registered students will be assumed to have watched the course videos the URLs for which will be provided in advance of each week's class (which will be assumed to take place in the interval from 4 to 6pm). The final session or sessions (depending on the number of class participants) will consist in youtube videos (ca. 20 minutes in length) created by the students in the class.
Registration: Details will be provided in due course. You can find preliminary orientation here under Part Time/Graduate.
Course Description: The course will provide an introduction to formal ontology from both a philosophical and an application oriented point of view. Ontologies to be considered will include:
Text: Robert Arp, Barry Smith and Andrew Spear, Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, August 2015, xxiv + 220pp.
Further readings are provided here: http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/ Example videos are provided here: https://www.youtube.com/user/hxo3nql/playlists
Requirements: This course is open to all persons with an undergraduate degree and some relevant experience (for example in data science, terminology research, logic, philosophy). 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. Grading will be on the basis of contributions to the on-line class discussion forum and on the quality and content of a 20 minute youtube video (with accompanying essay and powerpoint slide deck) on some topic in the field of formal ontology. Each student will be required to create one such video for presentation in the final class session on May 8. Examples of student videos created in comparable classes in the past are available here and here.
Grading will be based on:
- 1. forum participation (25%)
- 2. 20 minute youtube video (25%)
- 3. associated powerpoint slides (25%)
- 4. associated essay (25%)
For policy regarding incompletes see here
For academic integrity policy see here
