Ontological Engineering

Title: PHI 598 / IE 500: Ontological Engineering (Online class), Spring 2018.

Registration:

Class#: 23854 (PHI)

Class#: 23450 (ENG)

Off-campus students: Registration details are provided under Part Time/Graduate here.

Office hours: By appointment via email at phismith@buffalo.edu

The Course

Goal: The aim of this 3-credit-hour course is to provide an introduction to the methods and uses of ontological engineering, focusing on applications in areas such as military intelligence, engineering, and document processing. It will provide an overview of how ontologies are created and used, together with practical experience in the development of ontologies and in the use of associated web technology standards. It will also address some of the human factors underlying the success and failure of ontology projects, including issues of ontology governance and dissemination.

Course Structure: This will be a three credit hour on-line graduate seminar. It will be taught through the medium of a series of 2-hour long videos incorporating presentation of powerpoint slides and question-answer sessions. The final session will be structured around youtube videos created by the students in the class.

Schedule: The link to the course video for any given week will be provided at 9am on the corresponding Sunday (as listed below). Students are required to watch the video within 48 hours of this posting and to send a ~200 word summary of the content of this video to Dr Smith before the end of this period. In addition they should post to the class email forum any questions and comments relating to the video from the relevant week. Examples of video lectures from previous courses are appended below.

Text: Robert Arp, Barry Smith and Andrew Spear, Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, August 2015.

Ontologies are an important tool in all areas where data is collected and described by different groups in different ways. Ontologies provide taxonomy-based computerized lexica used to describe diverse bodies of data. They thereby help to aggregate and compare data, to make data more easily discoverable, and to allow large bodies of data to be more effectively searched and analyzed. Ontologies also play an important role in the so-called Semantic Web, where the Web Ontology Language (OWL) forms a central building block in the stack of web technology standards created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Ontology in Buffalo: UB ontologists are involved in a variety of national and international projects in the military, healthcare, bioscience, engineering, transport and financial domains. There is an acknowledged shortage of persons with ontological engineering expertise in all these fields, and in related fields such as journalism, manufacturing and government administration. UB ontologists also work closely with CUBRC, a Buffalo research, development, testing and systems integration company specializing in the areas of Data Science and Information Fusion; Chemical, Biological and Medical Sciences; and Aeronautics.

Schedule

January 28: Introduction to Ontology for Systems Engineering 1

February 4: Introduction to Ontology for Systems Engineering 2

February 11:

February 18:

February 25:

March 4:

March 11:

March 18:

March 25: Spring Recess

April 1:

April 8:

April 15:

April 22:

April 29:

May 6: Student presentations in video format

Provisional list of topics

1. Introduction to Ontology for Systems Engineering

2. Big Data and How to Overcome the Problems it Causes

3. Ontology, AI and Robotics

4. Services, Commodities, Infrastructure

5. Product Life Cycle Ontology

6. Ontology and Information Engineering in the Healthcare Domain

7. The Science of Document Informatics

8. Finance Ontology

9. The Ontology of Plans

10. Ontology of Military Logistics

11. Ontology and Intelligence Analysis

12. Ontology and Data Fusion

13. Ontology of Terrorism

14. Presentations of Student Projects 1

15. Presentations of Student Projects 2

Grading and Related Policies and Services

Grading will be based on:

1. video summaries (2% per summary)

2. forum participation (14%)

3. 20 minute youtube video (20%)

4. associated powerpoint slides (20%)

5. associated essay (20%)

All students will be required to take an active part in class discussions throughout the semester. In addition they will be required to design and complete an ontology project, including written description, and brief presentation of the project in class. Students enrolled in the practical segment will be required to create a Protégé file to accompany their ontology project, and also to complete quizzes designed to gauge developing competence in the use of the Protégé Ontology Editor and SPARQL query language.

For policy regarding incompletes see here

For academic integrity policy see here

For accessibility services see here