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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

IAOA Summer Institute on Upper Ontologies, Toronto, August 8-11, 2017

The International Association of Ontology and its Applications (IAOA) is announcing the 2017 Summer Institute on Upper Ontologies

Participants from all sectors of applied ontology are invited to interact from August 8 to 11, in Toronto, Canada. As always, the Summer Institute will challenge the state of the art through lively discussions and hands-on problem solving rather than lengthy presentations.

CTS Ontology Workshop 2017, Microbiology for the CTSA: Ontological Approaches, Ann Arbor, October 25-26, 2017

Past Events

MatOnto Ontology Meetings

Date: April 3-5, 2017

Venue: All meetings are on the UB North Campus in Amherst, NY

Guest Participants

Clare Paul, Materials and Ontology Engineer, Air Force Research Lab, Wright-Patterson AFB, Dayton, Ohio

Hedi Karray, Production Engineering Laboratory, ENIT, Toulouse, France

Stephen Kahmann, Inovex Information Systems

Jordan Lewis, Inovex Information Systems

Note on 'MatOnto': The current MatOnto site hosts the Inovex semantic web software, which is in process of being rebranded as 'Mobi'.

Schedule

Monday 9am-noon: Park 141

Review of the open (= not legally encumbered) portions of the Materials, Manufacturing, and Design (MMD) vocabulary

Structure of the MMD vocabulary

Use of MMD in creating Aristotelian definitions.

Monday 1pm-4pm: Park 142

Review of Categories (against the background of the BFO distinction between universals and defined classes)

By close of Monday session: determination of the scope of MatOnto.

Tuesday 10am-noon: Park 141

Review of legacy ontologies in the public domain that might serve as inputs to MatOnto

Tom Hagedorn (Center for eDesign, UMass Amherst):

Center for eDesign General Overview

Additive Manufacturing Ontologies

A Semantic Knowledge Management System for Laminated Composites Ontology

Clare Paul (AFRL)

Materials Property Ontology (moving towards alignment with BFO)

QUDT (version 2.0) (under Information Artifact Ontology)

Semantic Materials, Manufacturing, and Design (includes modified QUDT)

Hedi Karray (Toulouse, ENIT)

Ontology of Materials

Information Commons for Material Science

Material Ontology

Ontorule Steel (Diaz, Polo)

Ruoyu Yang (UB Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering)

Functionally Graded Materials (Buffalo) Paper on original version Paper on enhanced ontology Enhanced ontology in OWL

TBD (and subject to time available)

MASON (LGIPM, RPK)

MaterialWays

Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI)

CEN SERES and ELSSI-EMD Workshop Output

CheEBI (already aligned with BFO)

Dumontier Chemistry

Dumontier Physics

Dumontier Periodic Elements

others?

Tuesday noon-5pm: Jeannette Martin Room, 5th Floor, Capen Hall (please bring lunch)

This session will be a heavy-duty working session involving multiple screens.

Screen 1: BFO open in an ontology editor

Screen 2: candidate domain ontology MatOnto input in another and project that onto a 2nd screen beside the BFO projection. We will feature in particular the SLACKS Semantic Knowledge Management System for Laminated Composites, which will be presented by Ian Grosse (UMass Amherst)

Screen 3: project information about the domain ontology onto a 3rd screen;

-- Annotate the classes and properties of the domain ontology to identify where the domain ontology entities would seem to align with BFO (first iteration). -- Annotate the classes and properties of the domain ontology with the initial set of "portion of material" categories -- Assess the domain ontology hierarchy from a mono-hierarchy perspective -- Remain in-session until Wed at 11:00 am, have lunch, organize and consolidate all material, discuss next steps (rather than Tue?)

Wednesday 9am-noon Park 141: Conclusion

At the conclusion of activity on Wed afternoon, we should have -- at least one location known to all where open MMD definitions for can be sourced -- an organized set of public domain information about each of the domain ontologies (location, description, articles, general initial assessment) -- a starting point for aligning the domain ontologies with the BFO (via class and property annotation of domain ontologies) -- some level of understanding about the correctness of any hierarchies; and as a result, a starting point for reengineering the hierarchy

-- Clare leaves no later than 3:00pm on Wed

Background

Industry Ontologies Foundry (IOF)

DMDII CHAMP initiative

Buffalo Ontology Group Meeting

Date: March 13, 4:00pm

Venue: Jeanette Martin Room, 5th Floor of Capen Hall, University at Buffalo (North Campus)

Dial-in details are provided below

Schedule

4:00pm Brief surveys of current ontology projects at UB:

1) Chris Stoeckert: Implementation of a referent tracking system with UPenn TURBO Slides

2) Jonathan Blaisure: Improving Secondary Use of Electronic healthcare record data Slides

3) CHAMP: Coordinated Holistic Alignment of Manufacturing Processes

4) MatOnto: The Materials Ontology

5) IOF: Industry Ontology Foundry

6) Mark Jensen: Ontology for the Research Domain Criteria framework of the National Institute of Mental Health Slides

7) Controlled Natural Language (CNL) interfaces to OWL and ontology editors

4:45pm Michael Grüninger(University of Toronto): The Quest for Semantic Integration in the Context of Manufacturing Slides

6:00pm Close

Past

Ontology Group Meeting, October 21, 2016

CTS Ontology Workshop 2016, Clinical Terminology Shock and Awe, Buffalo, NY, September 7-8, 2016

Ontology Group Meeting, Monday, April 25, 2016

Venue: Jeannette Martin Room, 567 Capen Hall, Buffalo

José M. Parente de Oliveira (ITA Brazil): "A Visual Formalism for BFO-Based Ontologies" Slides

Hedi Karray (ENIT, Tarbes, France): "Applications of Ontologies in Astrophysics and Manufacturing Domains" Slides

Mark Jensen (United Nations Environment Programme): "The UNEP Sustainable Development Goals Interface Ontology (SDGIO)" Slides

Organized jointly with the UB Center for Multisource Information Fusion

June 10, 2016

2pm Discussion on establishing an Industry Ontology Foundry, with talks by Barry Smith and Hedi Karay

3pm Presentation by Boran Brodaric on Water Feature Ontology and Timeless Wholes

May 19-20, 2016 Ontological Approaches to Sensor Data Analysis, Amherst, NY

March 21, 2016, 141 Park Hall, Buffalo

Fabian Neuhaus talk on DOL: The Distributed Ontology Language

February 17-19, 2016 Gainesville, FL

Workshop on BFO and the Ontology of Social Entities

Feb 2 and all Tuesdays until April 19 1-3:50pm, 141 Park Hall, Buffalo

A series of seminars on various ontology-related topics, listed here.

Feb. 1, 2016, 567 Capen Hall, Buffalo 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

Areas of Study

Careers in ontology

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

Biomedical Ontology Departments of Philosophy and Biomedical Informatics, University at Buffalo, Fall Semester 2016

Applied Ontology 2017, Spring Semester Online Course, Department of Philosophy, University at Buffalo

Advanced Biomedical Ontology 2017, Fall Semester, Departments of Philosophy and Biomedical Informatics, University at Buffalo

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.