Applied Ontology, Spring 2022

Title: PHI 449/549 Applied Ontology, Spring 2022

Faculty: Barry Smith

Registration: Class# 24197.

Course Structure: This will be a two credit hour on-line seminar for graduates and advanced undergraduates. It will be taught through the medium of a series of 2-hour-long videos incorporating presentation of powerpoint slides and question-answer sessions. Links to videos will be distributed according to the schedule below. The final session will be structured around youtube videos created by the students in the class.

Course Description: An ontology is a structured collection of terms used to tag data with the goal of making data deriving from heterogeneous sources more easily searchable, comparable or combinable. Ontologies allow information to be shared across communities of scientists with different sorts of expertise. The Gene Ontology, for example, allows researchers on aging to use data from cell biology, yeast biology, cancer biology, genetics, and gerontology, because all of these disciplines create data that are tagged using Gene Ontology terms. The course will provide an introduction to ontology from an application oriented point of view, focusing on the best practices for ontology development and on the development of plug-and-play ontology modules for re-use in different areas. Examples will be drawn primarily from biology and medicine, but no expertise in these disciplines is presupposed.

Schedule The link to the course video for any given week will be provided at 9am on the corresponding Monday (as listed below). Students are required to watch the video within 48 hours of this posting. Class participants are required to post to the class email forum questions, responses and discussion comments relating to the video from the relevant week.

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Mar 14: Basic Formal Ontology

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Mar 21 Spring Recess

Background Materials

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

Further readings are provided here: http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/

Requirements:

• For UB students: This 2 credit course is open to UB students who complete this 1 credit course on Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence.
• For non-UB Persons with an undergraduate degree and some relevant experience (for example data science or information engineering). Registration details are available under Part Time/Graduate here.
• No prior knowledge of ontology is required.

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 powerpoint slide deck) on some topic in the field of applied 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.

• Your video should be 20 minutes long; it will be graded on the basis of clarity and force of argument, interestingness of content, and quality of delivery, including response to questions.
• The video should be based on a powerpoint presentation of approximately 20 slides. The slides should provide a minimal amount of text (using 24 point font or above), together with accompanying graphics, for example charts representing data. You should not read the slides -- rather, you should use the slides as summaries of the successive points you want to make, and present these points ex tempore.

Class participants should communicate by email with Dr Smith to determine topic and scope of your video presentation and accompanying materials.

Grading will be based on:

1. forum participation (25%)

2. 20 minute youtube video content (25%)

3. 20 minute video delivery (25%)

3. associated powerpoint slides (25%)

For policy regarding incompletes see here

For academic integrity policy see here